On Sat, Jul 3, 2021 at 11:45 AM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:

On Sat, Jul 03, 2021 at 09:20:57AM -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
>
> Systemd is both good and bad.

I agree with most of what you assess as "good" and "bad" with systemd.
However...

> It uses ersatz data formats that are abjectly
> horrible. It uses binary logging, which means that one cannot use the full
> complement of Unix text filters to inspect logs....

To be fair, systemd isn't the first. BSD's sar program uses a binary
log file.

You mean System V's sar program? BSD has never had a sar program.

It's not in any of the CSRG releases, nor in any of {Free,Net,Open}BSD

systems that are around today.

It first appeared in System Vr1, and was in each of the following releases

if the listings of files on the net are any indication.

I'm not sure whether it's BSD's fault or only after it was pulled into
the systat package for Linux, but the binary format for the sar file
is (a) not self-describing, (b) not backwards compatible, and (c) not
stable between different versions, such that if you copy /var/log/sa/saNN
the files from one system and try to interpret it on another system, you
need to make sure that other system has the same version of sar installed.

Sounds awful...

Warner