The journald design is horrible to the point of useless

Posted Dec 2, 2011 17:16 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: The journald design is horrible to the point of useless by dlang
Parent article: That newfangled Journal thing

the idea that you can get the log messages when you ask for the status of a program only works in the trivial case where all the logs are written by the one pid that was started by the program you are asking about the status.

AFAIK this is wrong. Systemd puts each service into its own control group. Processes that the service generates stay in the same control group. The system status command can then consider all messages from the same control group, or the same systemd service, in order to catch everything from the service process and its children. This is actually in the proposal.

That this is a lot more difficult to do with the current infrastructure (SysV init and (r)syslogd) doesn't mean that it is, in fact, impossible in general. Systemd is not a complete exercise in futility.

It sounds as if you have decided that anything that LP writes is the Pony that you want and any criticism of it just means the person doing the criticizing is against all progress.

No. As far as I am concerned it is absolutely OK to criticise Lennart's and Kay's proposal, just as it is absolutely OK to criticise the existing syslog infrastructure and protocol. Progress results not from hanging on to the existing stuff at all costs, but from critical evaluation of both the old and any newly proposed stuff, and from putting the best ideas of both together to create something that is better than what we had before. Whether that is, in the end, a beefed-up syslogd or something entirely different is irrelevant as long as it solves the problems at hand and there is a reasonable compatibility path to the existing infrastructure. You will note that this also seems to be Rainer's attitude, although he is (for understandable reasons) somewhat biased towards the »beefed-up syslogd« end of the spectrum of possible solutions. (Which is of course OK.)

I've been using various syslogd implementations for a very long time and have usually been able to get them to do what I need, but that doesn't mean I'm blind to possible improvements that may come in from elsewhere. This IMHO is a better approach than dismissing all of a number of possible improvements outright just because one does not like the people who came up with them. No one (not even Lennart or Kay) believes that the journald proposal solves all possible problems with logging, but pretending that there are no problems with logging at all, or no serious problems, or that if there are in fact problems then the journald proposal doesn't solve them either, doesn't actually lead to progress.