On 2025-12-11 at 15:20, Nicolas George wrote: > Paul M. Foster (HE12025-12-11): > >> Systemd has a lot of parts, most of which most distributions don't >> use. One annoyance of systemd is that it effectively encrypts the >> system log. You have to use something like journalctl to get at >> the logs, rather than just feeding them to less or more. > > Are you complaining that you need a command provided by a binary in > your path to read these logs instead of another command provided by > another binary in your path? I think he's complaining that you need a dedicated, special-purpose command, rather than being able to use a general-purpose command that's also usable for many other things. The fact that the storage format is effectively opaque, and only such special-purpose commands know how to parse it, is probably also relevant (at the least because it's the reason those general-purpose commands can't be used). The fact that it's probably documented somewhere, even outside the journalctl/etc. source code, doesn't really help with that. That's certainly one of the major aspects of the reasons I don't care for the systemd ways of doing logging. I recognize that they have their advantages, and that there are good reasons people went to the trouble of implementing them; I just don't think those advantages outweigh the proprietariness-or-something-similar disadvantages, in most cases. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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