The journald design is horrible to the point of useless

Posted Dec 2, 2011 17:28 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
In reply to: The journald design is horrible to the point of useless by dlang
Parent article: That newfangled Journal thing

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.

I can't speak for the OP but from from my perspective, as someone who is not personally invested in the outcome, about 80% of the comments seem to be baseless negative personal animosity against LP or an appeal to tradition against progress. Half of the other 20% are making actual technical arguments pointing out flaws in the proposal and the other half are defending LP, pointing out positives about the proposal or just advocating keeping an open mind. Those that are defending tend to be responding more the 80% than to the actual constructive criticism of the 10%

Some of the constructive criticism is very pursuasive and I'm not at all sure that the journal is the right way to go, unlike with systemd which was so obviously the right, UNIX, way to do things that I wish it was written decades ago. I can't help of think about daemontools supervise and multilog, which I used very successfully for many years, and see LP as this generation's DJB.

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The journald design is horrible to the point of useless

Posted Dec 2, 2011 19:06 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

> and see LP as this generation's DJB

I think that may people would agree with you, including a LOT of the people who are being critical of LP and this proposal.

there are good reasons (and not just personal animosity or his license choice) that DJB's software did not take over the world.

LP: the new DJB?

Posted Dec 2, 2011 22:50 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

there are good reasons (and not just personal animosity or his license choice) that DJB's software did not take over the world.

However, some of DJB's ideas did become popular on technical merit. Maildir comes to mind.

I don't think Lennart and Kay are doing badly in comparison at all. Systemd in particular is likely to go a lot farther than Qmail or DJBDNS ever did, simply because, whatever its detractors may say, it does have all kinds of advantages compared to SysV init (the situation is a lot more obvious than with, say, Qmail vs. other MTAs) and the two don't go for DJB-style rest-of-the-world-be-damned my-way-or-the-highway backwards incompatibility in quite the same way. After all, systemd still interfaces with SysV init scripts and traditional syslogd but in a manner that introduces interesting and useful new features.

As far as journald is concerned, we'll have to see; maybe the future will just be a closer association between systemd and rsyslogd, which wouldn't be a bad thing either.

LP: the new DJB?

Posted Dec 3, 2011 3:39 UTC (Sat) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

Actually when I read some of the first design docs for systems I was greatly reminded of daemontools which I have used in all my big, 24/7 systems over the last decade. I chose daemontools because of its technical merits, because of obvious deficiencies in sysv init and despite the fact the software comes from Mars with its own filesystem layout and other needless complications. We even tried using svscan for pid 1. Systemd has all the technical merits and none of the deficiencies.

I hope this journal thing leads to some improvements but I'm less certain that the journal as described is the be all and end all of logging. Let's see where it goes.