wrong rsyslog dependency in ubuntu-minimal

[god]

According to dependencies of ubuntu-minimal rsyslog is considered to be part of minimal supported system. With the switch to systemd it's obsolete: the journald is shipped and running anyway and it already provides secure logging by default. IT would be better to remove rsyslog from ubuntu-minimal dependencies (and, ideally, from default install as well) and enables "ForwardToSyslog=no" in /etc/systemd/journald.conf - the users who are willing to install advanced legacy logging will still be able to do that just fine, but really does not belong to the bare-minimum system.

[Bryan Quigley (bryanquigley)]

AFAICT systemd is currently setup to not record it's journal to disk. I only see the current boot in systemd:
sudo journalctl --list-boots shows only 1 entry. Obviously we would want to change that first.. do you know if there is already a bug on it?

[god (humper)]

Not that I know of. Adding "mkdir -p /var/log/journal" to ubuntu's systemd package should be trivial though.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Richard Huddleston (rhuddusa)]

stumbled on this bug. was looking into removing rsyslog.

before i hit this bug, i had already
mkdir -p /var/log/journal
and set Storage=persistent in "/etc/systemd/journald.conf"
everything is working great

interesting note on my system
apt-cache --installed rdepends rsyslog
rsyslog
Reverse Depends:
  initscripts
  ubuntu-minimal

but
apt-cache --installed --no-breaks rdepends rsyslog
rsyslog
Reverse Depends:
  ubuntu-minimal

i think that depends comes from the Breaks stanza in the deb file. i think that is a bug in apt-cache, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

[god (humper)]

As of 16.10 ubuntu-minimal "Recommends: rsyslog" which I thin is still wrong but not as bad as dependency.