Negligable?

You think 16.16% of total CO2 emissions is "negligable"?

Uh, if you can pick something other than systemd, and you can, then systemd can be "swapped out".

So, by your criteria, systemd is a valid choice.

So don't ask it to do that, then.

You do know that the default is not to restart?

And that even if you do and for that then the restart attempts are rate-limited, just like with traditional init(1).

(Which is one of the biggest problems with the whole sysvinit horror -- it hardly uses the existing possibilities of init(1)).

Uh, that's "journalctl -f", no code needs ti be written.

Or just run rsyslogd.

Once upon a time (in 1977 actualy) I learned to program (in Fortran on an ICL 1903T). When introduced to the concept of files I was intrigued by the idea of "binary" files: "cool" I thought, "I can hide things in there and nobody can read them, 'cos it's binary". Image my disgust when I found that a simple "cat" to the terminal recalled all my "hidden" text.

Yes, the contents of a binary file are a bunch of ones and zeroes, but so are the contents of a "text" file.

Debian isn't a "good, complete server distro"?

You may be looking in the wrong place -- there is a lib for reading the journal, journalctl is just a simple client.

Hang on a second -- "chain these command line tools together", I've heard of that before -- don't we usually call that "the Unix way"?

I'd get right on working on that, except that the way journald has been designed makes that pretty hard.

Obviously another oversight by the systemd team.

Pity. If you had meant sysvinit you could have just carried on using your init scripts, systemd runs init scripts for backwards compatibilty. I don't know what it does with upstart -- I've been able to avoid that steaming mess.

Yes, upstart is pretty crappy, isn't it.

What's to configure?

systemd complains that starting Apache fails and shows the service as stopped but the process actually starts and Apache is working just fine, systemd apparently just doesn't know it?

You were using the standard Debian sysvinit scripts before, and they worked, you're using the standard Debian apache2 service, it should just work. If it doesn't that's a bug. (Actualy, looking at it, apache2 is still using the init script -- there is no apache2.service).

What does systemctl status apache2 show?

No, it's not a fact. If the log file is corrupt journald rotates it. It doesn't "delete it and throw it away".

The theory is:

Now, of course, having corrupted files isn't great, and we should make sure the files even when corrupted stay as accessible as possible. Hence: the code that reads the journal files is actually written in a way that tries to make the best of corrupted files, and tries to read of them as much as possible, with the the subset of the file that is still valid. We do this implicitly on every access.

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64116#c3

Except that isn't the bug report at all.

The real one was Bug 64116 - How does one fix journal corruptions?.

It was closed "RESOLVED NOTABUG" because you don't need to fix journal corruptions -- journalctl can read the corrupt files and journald rotates the file it's writing if corruption is detected. Nobody suggested you delete the logs.