Bug#1084924: The system-log-daemon virtual package

[Chris Hofstaedtler]

On Mon, Oct 28, 2024 at 11:04:02AM +0100, Helmut Grohne wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 28, 2024 at 04:37:06PM +0800, Sean Whitton wrote:
> > I think I see a way to distinguish these four cases in a way that gets
> > everyone what they want.
> > 
> > systemd adds an *empty* binary package
> >     Package: systemd-journald-is-syslog
> >     Provides/Conflicts: system-log-daemon
> 
> Thank you for bringing this up. Despite the little confusion in the end
> that Chris remarked, I think this practically covers the four cases.
> 
> However, I think there is a fifth case that is becoming more and more
> practically relevant. Both docker and podman now have a logging driver
> called journald.
> 
> https://docs.docker.com/engine/logging/drivers/journald/
> 
> I'm not yet sure exactly how this works, but the context is "slim"
> containers (i.e. those that do not run systemd as pid 1) and I very much
> expect them to not run a journald from the container environment either.
> Rather the container runtime essentially provides /dev/log and a
> journald socket to the container in some (unspecified?) way.

Wouldn't we expect that such containers have systemd (and thus
journald) installed, but nothing will start them (because there is
no init).

If that is the case (I think it currently is), then nothing special
needs to happen. If someone were to define how Debian should
*generally* behave in slim containers, maybe the /dev/log topic
should be part of that definition. But so far I don't think a
definition exists. Policy is probably silent about slim containers,
too?

Chris