The problem with the journal format is that Poettering used a completely new format for doing so, instead of one of the many existing formats out there that hav

The problem with the journal format is that Poettering used a completely new format for doing so, instead of one of the many existing formats out there that have an excellent design for such things. He could have used something like berkeley db, or sqlite, which have been used extensively to store machine-readable data, are fault-tolerant, and small memory footprints, and would have let developers and administrators use the many pre-existing tools that exist for both database types for log analysis. However, my philosophical problem is that there's no escape from it. I'd be perfectly happy with it existing if there was a way to turn it off, and let me use my own syslogd program in peace. Instead, I have yet another binary on my system that's running, with all of the problems that can bring, wasting cycles while I hand off log data for actual processing.