Re: Heads up: persistent journal has been enabled in systemd
Dmitry Smirnov <onlyjob@debian.org> writes:
> On Saturday, 1 February 2020 2:05:55 PM AEDT Michael Biebl wrote:
>> 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.
> I have a mixed feelings about that. I think that replacing rsyslog with
> journald is two steps back in regards to functionality and flexibility.
> Rsyslog in unparalleled with its ability to process and filter messages
> (rainerscript), to transform messages (liblognorm), to forward messages
> to Elasticsearch or centralise Rsyslog instance, _reliably_ (relp), to
> buffer message queue on disk in case communication is disrupted, etc.
I completely agree with this assessment of the quality of rsyslog
features, but I'm not sure that's the right criteria to be considering for
the choice of the *default*. I'm fairly certain that 95% or more of
installed Debian systems never used any of those features, as nice as they
are.
The goal of the default is not to provide in latent form every excellent
feature that anyone may want to use. It's to provide a hopefully simple,
reliable, functional, and light-weight implementation of a facility that
serves as a reasonable default for most systems. Anyone with other needs
or preferences is very likely to replace or supplement that implementation
with something else, similar to how I replace exim4 with postfix on all of
my systems.
> Am I correct that journald is nowhere near that functionality?
Yes.
> As a heavy user or Rsyslog features I feel that switching default
> logging system yields no benefits to say the least.
As a heavy user, perhaps you're not the target audience for a default?
You're going to install rsyslog no matter what, since you know it well and
use it heavily. The only effect of this change on you will be a one-line
change to whatever you use for configuration management for new systems.
The primary benefit that I can see is one fewer daemon running on a
default installation, one fewer thing to have security vulnerabilities or
some other problems, one fewer thing to keep up to date, and a smaller
base installation. To be clear, these benefits are fairly minor, but they
do exist.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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