this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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You can still forward to text syslog or to a central logging server like Loki if working with multiple hosts. I still don't get the issue with binary logs.
Yes, and many distros have that out of the box... But they don't have it sent to keep the binary journal as close to empty as possible. So you end up with twice the space in use for logs. As for the issue with binary logs, text logs can be read by far more tools and utilities, rather than just journalctl and pipes.
You can set the space limit for journals logs really low then, to avoid double space usage. As for the last argument, that also was an issue for me years ago because not all tools were compatible with the journald format, but that's since long fixed now and I've not experienced any issue for a long time. Journal logs provide a standard format for all applications, so third party tools don't need to be compatible with every log format of your applications. And it also comes with great additional features like -b or --since etc. So I still don't get the issue here
The issue is logs are suppose to be text. Seriously, wtf. You some Poettering fan boy or something?
I was arguing how it is a very useful tool with many great additions, rather than rely on the: "no old better!" reply based on ignorance. But it looks like your replies have turned full removed, so no point in continuing here to try and educate you.
Text is compatible with all the grep, awk, sed, text editors, what have you. As for the argument of it binary saving space, not on modern filesystems with compression, like zfs, btrfs, and bcachefs. The entire resistance against tampering is bogus, any systems where that is a concern already live scrape logs to an off server indexing service. If you are concerned about poorly formatted logs, that is an application configuration issue. Address it directly with the application. There are no benefits to a binary log, especially when journalctl is absolutely no faster at jumping to the end of the long log than standard less is. Poettering has you chasing phantoms. He always does. He's like the politician who justifies horrible bills by saying it's to protect the children.