Bug#717388: Volunteers needed to work on enabling persistent journal

[Andreas Henriksson]

Mostly for the record...

I asked Michael Biebl about this bug report and if it's time to
reconsider it for Buster. He mentioned it probably should and that he
now sees the journal as being mature and robust enough, but that he does
not have time to work on it. The same likely goes for the rest of the
Debian systemd maintainers team as well. The main blocker is now thus
getting the job done.

There where some discussion on irc following this that I'll try to
summarize, mostly paraphrasing:

The main issue is making sure there's consensus on the change.

Implementation wise:
- we should make sure to not store logs twice, so (r)syslog daemon
  should not be part of the default install once this is done.
- should /var/log/journal be created by a separate package or not?
- Should the package creating /var/log/journal have Provides:
  system-log-daemon, kernel-log-daemon ?
  That would make a syslog daemon uninstallable, as all of them
  Conflict/Provides/Replaces system-log-daemon.
  Not adding the provides was suggested, but then the rdeps of
  system-log-daemon (primarily anacron which is part of default install)
  would pull in a system log daemon and we would have double logging.
  The discussion was leaning towards all rdeps needing fixing.
- (How to handle updates? Consensus seemed to be towards no change on
   updates.)


Are you interested in helping out making this happen? Speak up!
(I'm interested to work on this myself, but my time is also quite
limited so it might not happen for buster unless others also help out.)



system-log-daemon rdeps:

$ grep-dctrl -FDepends,Recommends system-log-daemon -sSource:Package < /var/lib/apt/lists/deb.debian.org_debian_dists_unstable_main_binary-amd64_Packages | uniq
Package: anacron
Package: approx
Package: cloudprint
Package: fwlogwatch
Package: heartbeat
Source: inetutils
Package: logcheck
Source: ltsp
Package: lyskom-server
Package: nullmailer
Package: prelude-lml
Package: psad
Package: request-tracker4
Source: resource-agents
Package: rlinetd
Package: snort
Package: sympa
Package: xinetd
Package: zoneminder


Regards,
Andreas Henriksson