I wish systemd would get over its thing about syslog
Anyone who works with systemd soon comes to realize that systemd just doesn't like syslog very much. In fact systemd is so unhappy with syslog that it invented its own logging mechanism (in the form of journald). This is not news. What people who don't have to look deeply into the situation often don't realize is that systemd's dislike is sufficiently deep that systemd just doesn't interact very well with syslog.
I won't say that bugs and glitches 'abound', because I've only run into two issues so far (although both issues are relatively severe). One was that systemd mis-filed kernel messages under the syslog 'user' facility instead of the 'kernel' one; this bug made it past testing and into RHEL 7 / CentOS 7. The other is that sometimes on boot, randomly, systemd will barf up a significant chunk of old journal messages (sometimes very old) and re-send them to syslog. If you don't scroll back far enough while watching syslog logs, this can lead you to believe that something really bad and weird has happened.
(This has actually happened to me several times.)
This is stupid and wrongheaded on systemd's part. Yes, systemd doesn't like syslog. But syslog is extremely well established and extremely useful, especially in the server space. Part of that is historical practice, part of that is that syslog is basically the only cross-platform logging technology we have, and partly it's because you can do things like forward syslog to other machines, aggregate logs from multiple machines on one, and so on (and do so in a cross-platform way). And a good part of it is because syslog is simple text and it's always been easy to do a lot of powerful ad-hoc stuff with text. That systemd continually allows itself to ignore and interact badly with syslog makes everyone's life worse (except perhaps the systemd authors). Syslog is not going away just because the systemd authors would like it to and it is high time that systemd actually accepted that and started not just sort of working with syslog but working well with it.
One of systemd's strengths until now has been that it played relatively well (sometimes extremely well) with existing systems, warts and all. It saddens me to see systemd increasingly throw that away here.
(And I'll be frank, it genuinely angers me that systemd may feel that it can get away with this, that systemd is now so powerful that it doesn't have to play well with other systems and with existing practices. This sort of arrogance steps on real people; it's the same arrogance that leads people to break ABIs and APIs and then tell others 'well, that's your problem, keep up'.)
PS: If systemd people feel that systemd really does care about syslog and does its best to work well with it, well, you have two problems. The first is that your development process isn't managing to actually achieve this, and the second is that you have a perception problem among systemd users.
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