[alephnil]

I guess that much of the resistance against the binary logs of systemd is the unfamiliarity and to some extent lack of well known tools for dealing with them. Sysadmins that have years of experience with traditional Unix tools now suddenly have to start almost from scratch when it comes to everyday tools for examining the system. Not only that, programmers are also most familiar with text based formats, and libraries for handling these formats have to become more available in the most popular programming languages and become familiar for programmers that develop tools for analysing systems. Until that happens, sysadmins feel that they are set back by the introduction of binary logs, even if binary logs are technically superior.

[wang_li]

It's like no one remembers the reasons we switched away from fixed format records. The biggest of which is that text based logging is a lot more future proof. Sure I might have to change a regex when time stamps improve their resolution to milliseconds, but at least I won't have to rebuild my entire suite and deal with two incompatible binary files on disk.