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> the only computer available did not have journalctl This is exactly what I don't understand. This is a world where no other computer exists? I have bigger th

by geofft 5y ago

> the only computer available did not have journalctl This is exactly what I don't understand. This is a world where no other computer exists? I have bigger things to worry about (even if you scope the problem down to to "no other computer with journalctl installed exists on my network"). > Or if you're writing to network storage and would like to analyze the logs from your haiku box. I don't have any Haiku boxes, but I do have Windows boxes. At my day job, where I'm a Linux sysadmin for a large finance company, my workstation is Windows, and I don't have admin on it. So even with conventional UNIX logs, a much more common case is - as I mentioned - that I'd want to read them from a computer that doesn't have gzip installed. But we're fine with gzip logs, because the way I'd actually do this is to get a Linux computer running. (Also, keep in mind that the filesystem itself is a binary format. If you're really worried about reading logs from Haiku, you wouldn't put /var/log on NFS because that sounds like a terrible idea, you'd log to a FAT filesystem. But nobody actually does that. Everyone's logs are on ext4 or XFS or btrfs or whatever, and nobody says those formats are a bad idea.)

gwillen 5y ago
Note that not every journald/journalctl is created equal. It's easy to end up with logs written on one computer that journalctl on another computer can't read, even if the latter is a newer version, depending on which settings each one was compiled with (which is mostly a distro question.)
- geofft 5y ago
  All right, then that seems like a reasonable objection to the format, not simply "It's a binary format." gzip files created anywhere can be read by any version of gzip. A standalone (and cross-platform) journalctl file reader seems like a useful thing to have around and not a terribly difficult thing for someone to build.
dec0dedab0de 5y ago
This is exactly what I don't understand. This is a world where no other computer exists? What about a windows user that has a smart device of some sort that is acting up. They're able to dump the files, but now they have to read them. It's a more realistic scenario than a haiku box, but its the same idea. And for the record, I am against gzip logs too. I think if you need to save that many logs you should be exporting them to another system instead of archiving them locally.

by geofft 5y ago

gwillen 5y ago

Note that not every journald/journalctl is created equal. It's easy to end up with logs written on one computer that journalctl on another computer can't read, even if the latter is a newer version, depending on which settings each one was compiled with (which is mostly a distro question.)

geofft 5y ago
All right, then that seems like a reasonable objection to the format, not simply "It's a binary format." gzip files created anywhere can be read by any version of gzip. A standalone (and cross-platform) journalctl file reader seems like a useful thing to have around and not a terribly difficult thing for someone to build.

dec0dedab0de 5y ago

This is exactly what I don't understand. This is a world where no other computer exists? What about a windows user that has a smart device of some sort that is acting up. They're able to dump the files, but now they have to read them. It's a more realistic scenario than a haiku box, but its the same idea. And for the record, I am against gzip logs too. I think if you need to save that many logs you should be exporting them to another system instead of archiving them locally.