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

[Josh Triplett]

On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 05:14:03PM +0100, Andreas Henriksson wrote:
> 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.)

I'm interested in helping with this.

I think we should *always* provide /var/log/journal, and continue to
configure systemd to not use the persistent journal by default rather
than autodetecting via the existence of /var/log/journal; that way, we
don't have issues with packages accidentally enabling the journal just
because they want that directory for other reasons, such as
systemd-journal-remote.  Then, let's have an installable package that
enables the journal using a drop-in configuration snippet in
/usr/lib/systemd/journald.conf.d/*.conf , and an additional installable
package that Provides/Conflicts/Replaces system-log-daemon and depends
on the package providing that drop-in configuration snippet.  That way,
people can use journald as their *only* syslog, *or* they can choose to
enable both it and syslog if they want something like remote syslogging.

Separately, we really need to move to a "default-system-log-daemon |
system-log-daemon" approach for Depends/Recommends/Suggests from other
packages, so that we can change the defaults more easily.  And at that
point, once we've made it trivial to switch between rsyslog and
systemd-journal-syslog by just installing a different package, we could
potentially switch the default to systemd-journal-syslog.