Devuan 1.0 RC2 Released: Systemd-Free Debian

[Adarion]

AFAIK journald logs are chain-hashed so you can't do that. Sure you can delete everything, but that's kind of obvious.

( Yes, of course everything is binary in the end. A stream of on and offs, each with a meaning if it is instruction or data - but other wise the computer is indifferent towards them. But for humans there might be a difference. )

Well, that might be a feature than can come in handy in certain situations, indeed. But to be honest, one could do all the hashing also with human readable text files, right? For the computer it is just another stream of ons and offs. So that can't be the reason for non-human-readable logs, can it?

[starshipeleven]

( Yes, of course everything is binary in the end. A stream of on and offs, each with a meaning if it is instruction or data - but other wise the computer is indifferent towards them. But for humans there might be a difference. )

Dunno about you, but reading an ascii file ("plain text") from its binary form is not really practical for a human anyway. You know, you read 8 numbers at at time and check the ASCII table (or go by memory) for each letter and symbol. Sounds like tons of fun.

Well, that might be a feature than can come in handy in certain situations, indeed. But to be honest, one could do all the hashing also with human readable text files, right?

Yeah, but it would add a ton of useless crap to the log for purely ideological reasons (preserving the holyness of "ascii-encoded binary files" as if they were easier to read for a human anyway).

The hashes would be largeish if compared to each logged message (ever seen SHA1sums?) and also pretty meaningless for humans reading that file, adding machine-only crap in text files is plain wrong, the only reason to have all ASCII-encoded is to have it easier to read for a human, not for its own sake.
Machine-reading of text files is stupidly inefficient already, adding more crap a sysadmin would want to filter out with yet another grep/awk pipe isn't a good idea.

So that can't be the reason for non-human-readable logs, can it?

Binary files are the best way where you can implement something like that (that way all machine-only crap will be seen only by programs and never shown to the user unless specifically asked for).
The other reason to have binary logs was that they had to make binary-like logs anyway for logging early-boot stuff where there is nothing more than raw RAM.
Another one was that with a binary log they could deal with much more logged stuff (systemd logs much more than older init, everything each service posts on stdin or sterr is logged, that's a ton of stuff) with much less annoyance as the reader program finds the stuff you need much faster than any text-manipulation tools like awk/grep/whatever. (And is also far easier to use as you are giving it direct orders for dates and types of messages and all that, not trying to figure out ways to filter out the text you need with generic text stream editing tools)

FYI: the only way to get any sense out of text-based system logs in work scenarios is to use programs that find the text you need in them (just as if they were binary files read by a reader program).
Go try reading a serious server log (or even a normal desktop log if you aren't looking at something happened recently) without grep/awk and company, you'll get old while scrolling pages and pages of stuff.

[starshipeleven]

For a mouse user, using journactl is slower than browsing /var/log files, you must be root and use the keyboard for scrolling.

There are GUIs for that too https://github.com/pentix/qjournalctl/ and it's not even hard.

[starshipeleven]

That only proves how crap Linux ME edition is, it needs third party utilities to be usable.

Blame your distro for not including tools for the command-line challenged, lol.

OpenSUSE has a GUI for journald in Yast (same as it has one for old syslog), in case someone was wondering what was the master race.

[starshipeleven]

LOL, I blame Linux Me developers not using the less command functionality that has enough mouse functionality

Good luck scrolling with your mouse through any decent-sized log, that was completely unpractical even before systemd's heavier logging.

in xfce4-terminal where you can scroll and copy paste with the mouse.

FYI: any virtual terminal allows you to copy-paste with the mouse, but that's far less useful than the ability to filter the input easily.