I have some difficulty figuring out the use-cases for journald over (some) plainish text log files. Our disks are getting faster and bigger. If you need to consolidate logs you have many options (starting with rsyslogd). If you need to log gigs of data, that can't possibly be kernel/initd logs?! And if it's application logs why not pipe it through something for indexing? By definition if i need kernel/local/init log files it's because something went very wrong: in such cases problems with clean shutdown/startup seems very likely - and in such use - cases plain text to file/serial wins hands down.

I'm not against having a wrapper that magically slurps stderr/stdout to timestamped logs -- but if that can't be written cleanly with the apis we have, then surely what we need is to make the minimal improvement in our (probably kernel) api to make writing such a program a trivial exercise? Nothing I've seen of systemd has me convinced the project cares one whit about finding the simplest, least coupled solution to any problem.