On Mar 21, 2018, at 3:31, Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:

There are also ways in which Unix is just simply deficient.  For
example, take syslog.  It's simple, sure, but it has an extremely
simple structure, and it's not nearly flexible enough for more
sophisticated use cases.  As a result, *many* commercial Unix systems
have tried reinventing an event logging system which had more structure.

I've been told that syslog was came in existence as a debugging aid for sendmai.

jaap