On Tue 24 Mar 2020 at 14:19:34 (+0100), to...@tuxteam.de wrote: > On Tue, Mar 24, 2020 at 08:55:32AM -0400, rhkra...@gmail.com wrote: > > On Tuesday, March 24, 2020 04:38:10 AM to...@tuxteam.de wrote: > > > There are valid reasons for systemd's binary format. Space savings > > > is very far off the top of the list (probably it isn't on that list > > > at all). > > > > Can you (or someone else) elaborate on that a little? > > Strictly defined structure instead of parsing. Indexing, so you can > easily cross-reference logs. Support for cryptographic integrity > (think blockchain). > > You might think these features are worth the complexity or they > aren't, but assuming the designers are idiots is wrong on more than > one level. > > > (Aside: I don't (yet -- or at least not intentionally) use systemd (well, > > or > > have any trouble / interaction with it -- I suppose it might have been > > installed on either my Jessie or Buster installs by default, and I haven't > > had > > to dig into those logs, so don't know if they're readable.) > > I can't check right now, but AFAIK Debian's default config forwards the > binary logs to something logging in text, to be backwards compatible > (to oldish sysadmins, like me ;-)
Yes, AFAIK that's what my logging is relying on, in which journalctl only handles the current boot, and text logs store everything. And AIUI in order to change over to all-binary logging, you have to create the directory for it: /var/log/journal. Which is why I don't understand the moaning about systemd's binary logs: AFAICT, you asked for it, you got it. But what do I know; I just run plain vanilla Debian. Cheers, David.
