Re: Heads up: persistent journal has been enabled in systemd

Hi,

Not sure if stated in any documentation, but I will ask here since it is easier to get clarification.

Why was rsyslog used as the persistent storage instead of journald for previous Debian distribution?

I did not check but is the current journald temp session log storing data in binary format maybe? Since it was stated in the email that users can use other log package if text format is preferable.

On that topic, why use the network manager package instead of the networkd? This is actually a similar situation for current stable of Debian.

Simon

On Sat, Feb 1, 2020, 11:24 AM Michael Biebl <biebl@debian.org> wrote:

Hi,

with today's upload of systemd 244.1-2 I finally enabled persistent
journal by default [1]. It has been a long requested feature.

The package will create a directory /var/log/journal on upgrades and new
installs, which enables persistent journal in so called auto mode.

If you decide, that you want to disable the persistent journal again,
you can run:
journalctl --relinquish-var; rm -rf /var/log/journal

Future package updates will respect this choice and not re-create the
directory. You can, of course, also configure this explicitly via the
Storage= option in journald.conf.

Depending on how it goes, I might ask the ftp-masters to lower the
priority of rsyslog from important to optional, so it would no longer be
installed by default on new bullseye installations.
This would avoid, that we store log messages twice on disk.
Users that prefer text logs can of course still install rsyslog by
default (or their syslogger of choice).
Alternative init systems might consider adding a Recommends on a syslog
implementation of their choice or creating a task, which would pull in a
syslogger.

Here are some resources that you might find useful:
- man journald.conf
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/journald.conf.html#
- man journalctl
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/journalctl.html#
- man systemd-journald.service
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-journald.html#

Regards,
Michael

[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=717388