Re: logging no longer standard?
On Sat, 5 Aug 2023 15:09:41 +0000
Andy Smith <andy@strugglers.net> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> On Sat, Aug 05, 2023 at 09:23:25AM -0400, Greg Wooledge wrote:
> > In any case, this is not a popular change.
>
> I don't think that's clear. I think that amongst a population of
> people who care deeply about logging it's generally unfavourable,
> and I myself don't particularly enjoy using journalctl so I'd kind
> of sort of put myself in that category except you know what? I just
> can't bring myself to get worked up over it.
>
> I think that the vast majority of Debian users just do not care
> (or even know) and are content using journalctl.
>
> For those of us who do care, installing rsyslog takes seconds.
> Disabling the systemd journal (if you want to)_ takes another few
> seconds. This email took longer.
But will the syslogs continue 'for the foreseeable future' or are there
already plans to drop them from Debian?
>
> As such I'd file it as a reasonable change that I'm not 100% happy
> about and has resulted in a couple of extra lines in the Ansible
> playbook I use to provision machines. I don't think about it until
> the next time there is a thread of people getting bent out of shape
> over it.
>
> Whether on balance it is net positive or net negative I don't know.
>
> > I will also point out that this change is well-documented, both in
> > the official release notes[1] and in the wiki.[2] Reading these
> > resources before an upgrade is highly recommended.
>
> The release notes in particular are essential reading since
> otherwise a person won't know about major components that have
> changed, been replaced etc.
Indeed, but they just tell us *what* stuff has changed, The job of
finding out what has to be actually done in order to continue doing
whatever we do, still has to be done, and that's time wasted. Obviously
things have to change, but backwards compatibility is very important to
minimise such wasted time, as far as possible.
I'm not a professional, I've just run a home/small business server
starting with sarge, and I consider that system administration time
could be better spent either working or playing.
In this fairly minor case, for example, I use 'tail -f <log>' at least
once a week, mainly on syslog itself, debug (where my firewall logs
to), daemon and exim4/mainlog. I'm sure there is a way to do this with
systemd, but it's something else to learn, a bit more running just to
stay still.
--
Joe
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