Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Is gnome becoming obligatory?

[Wols Lists <antlists@youngman.org.uk>]

On 11/12/17 22:29, Neil Bothwick wrote:
>> I don't want a binary logging daemon either: that means having to learn
>> > a special purpose utility to be able to read its logs, and, in general,
>> > not being able to read that log from a remote machine.

> "journalctl" is just the same as "less /var/log/messages" so here's not
> much to learn unless you want to use the search features. Reading the log
> from a remote machine is easy, using either SSH or HTTP, whichever you
> prefer. My one complaint about the systemd journal is that there is not,
> AFAIK, a standalone reader. If I want to boot from a live CD, I can only
> read the logs if it is a systemd live CD, or I chroot into the original
> system. Unless someone knows different...

If the log isn't binary, what is it? Plain text? Well, I certainly can't
read it just by looking at the disk surface!

Yes, I know I'm being facetious, but there's no such thing as plain text
on a computer. And I'm well aware of five or six or more binary text
encodings - from the folowing list I think about the only one I haven't
used is EBCDIC ...

Okay, I said EBCDIC.
Then there's ASCII - is that parity off? parity on? parity set?
Then there's lines separated by <CRLF> - or is that <LF>? or is that <LF
with optional trailing NULL>?
And that's just the versions I know of and have met ...

There's no such thing as "plain text", as anybody using samba or ftp
between different types of system will testify to their cost with
trashed and broken files that screwed up in transfer ... :-)

Cheers,
Wol