[TUHS] Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy' • The Register

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Sun, Jun 23, 2024 at 11:47:52AM +1000, Alexis wrote:
> Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> writes:
> 
> > My server runs Sendmail, and I have no idea what "journalctl" is (it
> > sounds Penguin-ish, which I definitely don't run).
> 
> It's systemd's program for accessing the binary logs it generates. So, yes,
> it's Penguin, in the sense that systemd is explicitly not supported on
> anything other than Linux.

Systemd certainly isn't a pioneer in terms of binary log files.  The
first such "innovation" that I can think of is Ultrix's (and later
OSF/1 and Tru64)'s uerf (Ultrix error report formatter).  AIX also had
binary error logs that needed to be decoded using the errpt command.
And Solaris's audit logs are also stored in a binary format.

All of these "innovations" consider it a Feature that it becomes
easier to store and filter on structured data, instead of trying to
write complex regex's to pull out events that match some particular
query.

						- Ted