[Pkg-systemd-maintainers] Bug#717386: Bug#717386: systemd-journal group does not exist

[Michael Stapelberg]

Hi,

Josh Triplett <josh at joshtriplett.org> writes:
>> > However, systemd does not create this group.
>> 
>> As a result, journalctl doesn't work:
>> 
>> ,----
>> | $ journalctl                           
>> | Hint: You are currently not seeing messages from other users and the system.
>> |       Users in the 'systemd-journal' group can see all messages. Pass -q to
>> |       turn off this notice.
>> | No journal files were opened due to insufficient permissions.
>> `----
I am not sure I buy “journalctl doesn’t work”. It works as intended, you
just don’t have the nice feature of being in a special group to get more
read access than you currently have. journalctl per se does work,
e.g. as root.

> Ideally, this message should be extensible to indicate that membership
> in the "adm" group works as well, since that's the standard Debian group
> to get access to log files.
Agreed.

Thanks for creating a bug report to track this, it was planned from our
side to do this (but after the upload). I see three action items here:

1. (bug #717386) Create the systemd-journal group
2. (bug #717388) Ensure systemd-journal and adm have read access to
   /var/log/journal
3. (bug #717388) Patch the message in journalctl to make users aware
   of the adm group.

-- 
Best regards,
Michael