> "Oh but isn't it neat you can pipe it to grep?" NO! No it's not neat, maybe it was neat 20 years ago. Today I want that damn data in a structure. Then you can still print it out in one line and pipe it to grep all you want.
The systemd journal works how you describe, and it is very painful to interact with. I'll take plaintext logfiles any day of the week.
It's fine if you want to interact with the log in ways that have been designed into it. But:
- it's harder to work out what you can delete to free up space in an emergency
- it's harder to get logrotate to do what you want
- it's harder to use "tac" to search through the log from the bottom up
> I want my software configuration stored in a database
So now you can't put comments in your config, you can't (as easily) deploy config with puppet, or in RPMs. You can't easily diff separate configs.
All the things that you mention can in theory be fixed over time.
The stuff I'm talking about is not for the next 6 months. It's not very meaningful to compare it against the current tools and landscape.
I can almost imagine a similar conversation in the past.
Someone saying "MAYBE ONE DAY WE CAN FLY!" and everyone's like "BUT OUR HORSES CAN ONLY JUMP 2 METERS HIGH! It would never work."
I understand your comment from a pragmatic point of view but none of those problems are big or important enough that we couldn't fix them in other ways.
Throwing away a rich structured piece of data and trading that for a dumb line of characters that needs to be re-parsed just so that it's easier to use logrotate and tac with them and so on is a losing trade.
Reminding me of one of the little niceties of Gobolinux.
You have a pristine pr version config copy sitting in the main dir, and a package-wide settings dir. It also provides a command (implemented as a shell script, as is most of Gobolinux tools) that gets run upon installing a new package version.
If said command detects a difference between existing and new config files it gives you various options. You can have it retain all the old files, replace them with the new files, or even bring up a merged file that give you the new lines as comments next to the old ones.
The systemd journal works how you describe, and it is very painful to interact with. I'll take plaintext logfiles any day of the week.
It's fine if you want to interact with the log in ways that have been designed into it. But:
- it's harder to work out what you can delete to free up space in an emergency
- it's harder to get logrotate to do what you want
- it's harder to use "tac" to search through the log from the bottom up
> I want my software configuration stored in a database
So now you can't put comments in your config, you can't (as easily) deploy config with puppet, or in RPMs. You can't easily diff separate configs.