> the only downside being that you need a specific program to tail them. The journal can output to text files as well! But this is exactly it, my only issue i

> the only downside being that you need a specific program to tail them. The journal can output to text files as well! But this is exactly it, my only issue is the ideological one that there is no spec for the database. The implementation is the specification, so the only true way of building a reader of logs is to implement the journal. There are attempts to document the layout but if there is any difference then you can't submit a bug to get the layout corrected but the implementation isn't wrong. I can think of plenty of other applications with bigger issues than that. But I think can still want the defacto log for Linux to have an official spec.