Bug#771523: systemd-journal-upload

[Gerben Meijer]

Although it is true that syslog can be set up to send logs to other
machines, there are use cases with systemd-journal-* that are not easily
achievable by syslog alone.

For one, syslog does not by itself guarantee delivery of messages. The
rsyslog-relp package can provide this but it is a separate package and
hence does not strictly qualify as trivial, plus the configuration to
reliably transmit messages even when the syslog client-server connection
is not working is not documented except on the rsyslog website.

With systemd-journal-upload, the --save-state=/some/file flags on
clients together with systemd-journal-remote --listen on a server will
guarantee the delivery of any journal entries that have not been
uploaded before. That is a lot more trivial than configuring rsyslog-relp.

Secondly, the feature set of systemd-journal-gatewayd is unique in that
it allows for remote clients to connect to a running machine and
retrieve or listen for events from its journal, such as core dumps. Such
functionality is simply unavailable with just syslog. It in fact allows
remote journal viewing without a running server to which the journal is
being sent.

Even if its maturity is unknown, it is a maintained feature and was
mentioned at FOSDEM 2015. By not packaging it, users aren't able to use
it and there won't be any reports on its use at all.

Though admittedly the dependancy on libmicrohttpd is not ideal,
rsyslog-relp is a separate package from rsyslog as well so it would not
seem unreasonable to add the set of
systemd-journal-gatewayd|upload|remote tools as a separately available
package.


-- 
Regards.

Gerben Meijer
Day by Day