Heads up: persistent journal has been enabled in systemd

To: Debian Development <debian-devel@lists.debian.org>

Cc: pkg-systemd-maintainers <pkg-systemd-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org>

Subject: Heads up: persistent journal has been enabled in systemd

From: Michael Biebl <biebl@debian.org>

Date: Sat, 1 Feb 2020 04:05:55 +0100

Message-id: <[🔎] 3fe36957-87ca-a58b-a709-ac39e1e056ad@debian.org>

Hi, with today's upload of systemd 244.1-2 I finally enabled persistent journal by default [1]. It has been a long requested feature. The package will create a directory /var/log/journal on upgrades and new installs, which enables persistent journal in so called auto mode. If you decide, that you want to disable the persistent journal again, you can run: journalctl --relinquish-var; rm -rf /var/log/journal Future package updates will respect this choice and not re-create the directory. You can, of course, also configure this explicitly via the Storage= option in journald.conf. Depending on how it goes, I might ask the ftp-masters to lower the priority of rsyslog from important to optional, so it would no longer be installed by default on new bullseye installations. This would avoid, that we store log messages twice on disk. Users that prefer text logs can of course still install rsyslog by default (or their syslogger of choice). Alternative init systems might consider adding a Recommends on a syslog implementation of their choice or creating a task, which would pull in a syslogger. Here are some resources that you might find useful: - man journald.conf https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/journald.conf.html# - man journalctl https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/journalctl.html# - man systemd-journald.service https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-journald.html# Regards, Michael [1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=717388