That newfangled Journal thing

Posted Nov 20, 2011 18:56 UTC (Sun) by yoush (guest, #38940)
Parent article: That newfangled Journal thing

Trying new things is good.
Rethinking old traditions is good.

But forgetting of what was good in old traditions is bad.

It would be nice if people who propose to do things differently, will first write explicit lists of what was good in old way of doing things, and explain how these items will be done in the new way.

That's why we have a reviewers :-)

Posted Nov 20, 2011 19:15 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

It would be nice if people who propose to do things differently, will first write explicit lists of what was good in old way of doing things, and explain how these items will be done in the new way.

Well, this is where critics come in the picture. Lennart is suprisingly good when you present him a real-world task and is always ready to change his creations to support them. He notoriously bad when the real-world task is well, I have a script here, I'll not explain what it does and why I need it, but you'll break it so it's your resposibility to fix it, yes, but when you show willingless to think about things - he shows the willingless to help you.

One of the first decisions in the case of journald is side-by-side installability of syslog and journald. This means that the questions like "how should it work with remove loggers and such" have a natural answer "the same way as before". This also means that pressure to fix programs to be journald-firendly is not as big, but apparently Lennart understands that he can not force everyone to use journald right away.

That's why we have a reviewers :-)

Posted Dec 21, 2011 7:22 UTC (Wed) by topher (guest, #2223) [Link] (1 responses)

One of the first decisions in the case of journald is side-by-side installability of syslog and journald.

Better yet, instead of comparing least common denominator syslog, how about comparing it to the research and efforts that are already at work in solving these same problems, and already have solid workable solutions (without many of the negative aspects of "the journal").

If Lennart wants to come up with a new syslog replacement, doing better than basic syslog isn't good enough. Not *nearly* good enough. It needs to be better than syslog *and* all of the recent research *and* better than anything that could be layered on top of existing syslog (which is where it currently fails badly, IMO).

That's why we have a reviewers :-)

Posted Dec 21, 2011 16:58 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

If Lennart wants to come up with a new syslog replacement, doing better than basic syslog isn't good enough.

It is if you can force people using systemd to use it.

(This just provides a reason not to try out systemd: do I really want an increasingly large chunk of the system sucked into it, as now seems likely, disrupting my existing procedures? It's taking over from cron, and now syslogd... thanks but no thanks.)

That newfangled Journal thing

Posted Nov 20, 2011 19:25 UTC (Sun) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (4 responses)

The problem is that the old traditions do not work any more.

The number of logging messages has increased significantly. You don't need most of them except when something goes wrong, at which time you realize that you didn't log enough. Text files may be easily greppable but they're a security nightmare. So is remote syslogging via UDP. And so on.

That newfangled Journal thing

Posted Nov 20, 2011 21:05 UTC (Sun) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

Remember that there are many different ways to send logs with syslog, not just UDP. the options include encryption and delivery confirmation. Rsyslog (the default syslog on almost every distro now), supports all of this (including delivering well formatted messages that conform to the latest syslog RFC) out of the box.

That newfangled Journal thing

Posted Nov 21, 2011 5:48 UTC (Mon) by gmaxwell (guest, #30048) [Link] (2 responses)

"Something must be done!" "This is _something_" "Then it must be done!"

That newfangled Journal thing

Posted Nov 21, 2011 20:50 UTC (Mon) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link] (1 responses)

Exactly what is going on here.

That newfangled Journal thing

Posted Nov 23, 2011 21:14 UTC (Wed) by jonabbey (guest, #2736) [Link]

How do you figure? Do you imagine that this proposal is going to be adopted without regard to its virtues and deficits?

That newfangled Journal thing

Posted Nov 23, 2011 16:47 UTC (Wed) by sam-williams (guest, #57470) [Link]

yoush makes a particularly valuable point about implementing new technology. If you don't define what you have currently you are just changing things for change sake and that is a hit and miss proposition. Understand your needs, what your system currently provides, and then see if a significant change is still warranted.

Its important that once implemented, the Journal be accessible to the lowest common-denominator interface which means the commandline using the standard set of commandline utilities to extract desired information. If we can't produce this we've lost the value of this function.