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

[Andreas Henriksson]

On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 09:31:28AM -0800, Josh Triplett wrote:
> How about this:
> 
> systemd-journal-transient ships
> /usr/lib/systemd/journald.conf.d/transient.conf which explcitly disables
> the persistent jorunal by setting Storage=volatile.
> 
> systemd-journal-persistent ships
> /usr/lib/systemd/journald.conf.d/persistent.conf which explicitly
> enables the persistent journal by setting Storage=persistent.

Basically inventing a package for a config setting.
Other packages will easily be fooled by this. It's easy to assume
you can just then depend on eg. systemd-journal-persistent and
assume there's actually persistent journal but the admin might
have a setting in /etc/systemd/journald.conf that overrides
the systemd-journal-{transient,persistent} setting.
Maybe it's impossible to satisfy everyone, but my gut feeling is
not great about this. Feels like overengineering. I think we
might need something much "simpler" in the hope that if we invent less
we'll get less stuff wrong. It should also help when we try to sell
our solution to the systemd maintainers (and the general Debian
community).

> 
> systemd-journal-syslog Depends on systemd-journal-persistent |
> systemd-journal-transient (so that you *can* still explicitly choose to
> have syslog with transient-only storage, useful for some systems such as
> those with no persistent storage at all) and Conflicts/Provides
> system-log-daemon.

AIUI I don't see the point here. Once you Provides system-log-daemon
you can't have any other system-log-daemon installed (as they conflict
against your provides).

> 
> default-system-log-daemon would depend on rsyslog for now, and in the
> future, it could start depending on systemd-journal-syslog instead. (Or
> we could handle it as a virtual package, though that could make upgrades
> harder.)

Regards,
Andreas Henriksson