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

[Michael Biebl]

On Sun, 1 Oct 2017 17:11:03 +0200 Holger Levsen <hol...@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@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.

/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.



Thoughts?

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 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.

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