Bug#877414: systemd: please include a /var/log/README like Fedora has

Michael Biebl biebl at debian.org
Mon Sep 12 10:07:06 BST 2022


On Sun, 1 Oct 2017 17:11:03 +0200 Holger Levsen <holger at debian.org> wrote:
> Package: systemd
> Version: 232-25+deb9u1
> Severity: wishlist
> 
> Dear Maintainer,
> 
> this might be a totally bogus bug report (because I might have missed that
> this is already implemented in Debian, eg I only checked stretch and a sid
> schroot, but not a real sid system…), but I really like this on Fedora
> systems and I think we should have it in Debian too:
> 
> [user at fedora-25 ~]$ cat /var/log/README
> You are looking for the traditional text log files in /var/log, and
> they are gone?
> 
> Here's an explanation on what's going on:
> 
> You are running a systemd-based OS where traditional syslog has been
> replaced with the Journal. The journal stores the same (and more)
> information as classic syslog. To make use of the journal and access
> the collected log data simply invoke "journalctl", which will output
> the logs in the identical text-based format the syslog files in
> /var/log used to be. For further details, please refer to
> journalctl(1).
> 
> Alternatively, consider installing one of the traditional syslog
> implementations available for your distribution, which will generate
> the classic log files for you. Syslog implementations such as
> syslog-ng or rsyslog may be installed side-by-side with the journal
> and will continue to function the way they always did.
> 


So, what happened in the mean time is that since bullseye we do enable 
persistent logging and for bookworm the priority of rsyslog has been 
downgraded to optional, so rsyslog will no longer be installed by 
default (unless a package explicitly depends on it, which is not 
recommended)

This prompted me to revisit this bug report only to notice that my 
system already has

/var/log/README -> ../../usr/share/doc/systemd/README.logs

Apparently this is a result of
 
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/6fe23ff31c02c7e9607edd0df819e59da5d49abc
which went unnoticed.

We could either ship this symlink directly in the package as well (so 
dpkg will remove it if the package is uninstalled), or add an explicit 
cleanup to systemd.postrm.

Thoughts?
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