On Mon, 15.07.13 23:38, Mateusz Marzantowicz (mmarzantowicz@xxxxxxxxxxx) wrote: > On 15.07.2013 23:06, Lennart Poettering wrote: > > It's a matter of finding the right balance: i.e. what can be text > > files, and where we have to win more by making it binary. I am pretty > > sure this is a case where we win more by sticking to binary files. > > It's totally fine if you disagree on this, but I'd still like to ask > > you to think about whether your specific usecase and specific > > requirements are strong enough to (continue to) be the default for > > Fedora, instead of just being your local configuration of Fedora. I > > mean, you should never forget that on your own machines everything > > will stay as is: you will install syslog, and things will be exactly > > as before. Lennart > > So maybe we (Fedora) should go with XML instead of binary or some > dedicated RDMBS for storing system logs? I'm not against binary log > format but try to understand why it's superior to text and also why > something more sophisticated isn't used if we really need this > additional meta data that could not be included in plain text? XML and text files are not sanely indexable. Real database are large packages we cannot pull into minimal systems. Beyond that, and that's most important: the specific requirements are different from what those systems provide. We want something minimal, C-based, that can work without any service around, that can be mmapped by multiple processes at the same time. Something that indexes implicitly by all keys without any pre-defined schema. Something that primarily append-only (for robustness reasons). Something that is indexed by time, and interleavable. Something that can store binary blobs, that can optionally compress larger blobs. Something that can be rotated. Something that supports Unix access controls natively. Something that provides us with the right complexity guarantees. And more... If you create a domain-specific database, then you should not do that lightly. But this specific usecase certainly warranted this, and the journal does deliver the requirements we cared for. Lennart -- Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc. -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
