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Re: Using old (not systemd) system logs



On 2025-12-12 at 15:42, The Wanderer wrote:

> On 2025-12-12 at 14:31, Roy J. Tellason, Sr. wrote:
> 
>> On Thursday 11 December 2025 10:24:21 pm The Wanderer wrote:
>> 
>>> 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.
>> 
>> I'd be interested in hearing what those advantages are.
>> 
>> I keep bumping into things that are major changes away from what
>> I'm used to and understand,  and the first thing that comes to mind
>> for me is "Why?"...
> 
> To be clear, I'm not intimately familiar with them; I don't use
> systemd myself, and there are multiple reasons for that.
> 
> My understanding, however, is that they include:

<snip>

> For example, if you want to sort a plain-text log by timestamp,

<snip>

Another example, which I meant to include in the previous reply, but had
forgotten by the time I'd written out the rest:

If you want to diff two plain-text log files (or, via a few gynmastics,
different parts of the same one), but every line in the file is marked
with a timestamp, the diff will show every line as different between the
two. In order to produce a useful diff, you have to preprocess the files
to redact the timestamps to the same value.

With a structured binary log format, you can (at least in theory) easily
just not output the timestamp fields, and be able to straightforwardly
diff the parts where differences might actually be meaningful.

-- 
   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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