[systemd-devel] [ANNOUNCE] Journal File Format Documentation

[Ciprian Dorin Craciun]

On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 9:49 PM, Lennart Poettering
<lennart at poettering.net> wrote:
> On Tue, 23.10.12 20:13, Ciprian Dorin Craciun (ciprian.craciun at gmail.com) wrote:
>> > The other thing is simply that the stuff is really integrated with each
>> > other. The journal sources are small because we reuse a lot of internal
>> > C APIs of systemd, and the format exposes a lot of things that are
>> > specific to systemd, for example the vocabulary of well-known fields is
>> > closely bound to systemd.
>>
>>     I understand this issue with the focus. Nevertheless your journal
>> idea sounds nice, and I hope someone will take it and implement it in
>> a standalone variant. (I hope in a native compilable language...)
>
> Why? Why would anybody want to use the journal but not systemd? People
> who have issues with the latter usually are not rational about these
> things, and probably have a more philosophical/religious issue with
> systemd, but then will also have the issues with the journal since it
> follows the same philosophy and thinking.

    Ok. Just to state my bias: I'm currently neutral in the SysV / BSD
init vs systemd. I **really** do want to get rid of all the Bash-ism
initializing my system (actually I would ban Bash from newer
projects). But this is a totally different topic which has been
discussed on almost all the mailing lists related to Linux that I'm
subscribed to...

    Thus this is not the direction I want to head this discussion.


    My real motive for such a "detached" journaling system, I hope is
clear from my other "sub-thread" of this one related with separating
log files: that is I'm searching for a logging system suitable for a
PaaS...


> Also, note that the journal file access in libsystemd-journal works fine
> on non-systemd too. People can just split this off if they want, and use
> it indepdently of systemd, the same way they already do it with udev. No
> need to implement anything anew.

    Aha. So I could reuse the `libsystemd-journal` without any systemd
attachments. Good to know.


    Hope I didn't start a "flame-war" with this one. :)
    Ciprian.