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The Journal - a proposed syslog replacementThe Journal - a proposed syslog replacementPosted Nov 21, 2011 14:50 UTC (Mon) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106)In reply to: The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement by skissane Parent article: The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement
> I think the UNIX emphasis on plain text, while it had its value in its original historical context of trying to get something working quickly, it holds us back to keep it like it was some kind of unquestionable religious dogma.
It seems logical to say that a standard binary format is just as good as a standard text format, which is why this is carefully documented as one bullet point in the Unix philosophy: use text. The extra overhead was a lot worse back when this idea was developed, yet they stuck with it anyway. If you don't meditate on "Why" then you will invent a non-text system that's "as good or better" than text and suffer as a result. You can either accept received wisdom and "just do it," ignore this sage advice at your own peril or embrace the idea wholeheartedly.
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It's not true... Posted Nov 21, 2011 18:41 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] It seems logical to say that a standard binary format is just as good as a standard text format This is not true. To pull useful data from corrupted text file you need a human being. To pull it from binary format with embedded CRC checks you only need to rigorpously use one very fast function. Sure, this only protects the data from accidental changes (zero-out pages in the middle, bitflips, that kind of things) but the funny thing that when people describe how they heroically recover data from corrupt disk or filesystem it's almost always from accidental corruption. The extra overhead was a lot worse back when this idea was developed, yet they stuck with it anyway. Actually it's much worse today. When you had hundreds of kilobytes or may be few megabytes of logs - human as "recovery system" works. When there are gigabytes, terabytes and petabytes of logs - it's hopeless.
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