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Red Hat's Linux Changes Raise New Questions
itwbennett writes "Last month two Red Hat developers proposed to replace the 30-year-old syslog system with a new Journal daemon. Initial reaction was mostly negative and 'focused on the Journal's use of a binary key-value form of data to log system events,' says blogger Brian Proffit. But now, says Proffitt, it seems that the proposal to replace syslog has less to do with the fixing syslog's problems than with Red Hat's desire to go its own way with Linux infrastructure."
There are advantages to not having everything in ascii text, or else we would never see relational databases used for anything. You are right that we will see. I like plain text logs because I am still learning the ins and outs of the major Linux breeds, and not having to learn a special tool for every config file and log makes things easier; but I wont say that there couldnt be benefits to a more robust system.
Looks like they're pulling the same shit Ubuntu pulled with upstart (init replacement). "Let's replace something simple and elegant with something complex, incomplete, and very difficult to fix when it goes wrong".
One could make that argument about solid-state electronics, the move away from punch-cards, the move from paper-based filing, the move to journaled filesystems, etc.
Sometimes progress means letting go of the past, and sometimes it takes a while to fully bake; thats why RedHat doing the QA, testing, and development for the rest of us is a good thing. If it sucks, it will die, and noone really has to acknowledge that it ever existed.
Just yesterday I was debugging why my syspreped Win 7 images weren't installing properly. So I go to sysprep directory and start reading the text log. It didn't have any useful info. So I grabbed the binary log and tried to import it on the same machine in pre-exec environment. It couldn't do it. So I copied it to different computer and tried to open it there, the system claimed that the file was damaged. After 4 hours of struggle to read, copy or convert the bloody thing I went the "Microsoft recommended way" (seriously, that's the solution they suggest in MSKB) and bisected which program caused the install failure. In "only" 6 reinstalls I finally found the culprit.
If it was a Linux distro, a simple cat or tail would have sufficed and it would have been a 15 minute job, not 2 days. If they want my text logs they will have to pry it from my cold dead hands.