Description of problem: Bugzilla #831665 fixes the case where journalctl truncates lines in pager mode, but it apparently still does so in journalctl -f mode. This makes it significantly different from and arguably quite a bit less useful than `tail -f /var/log/messages`. On one system with a moderately-long (automatically assigned) hostname, I get only about 10 characters of actual message per line. I really think --full is the user-friendly default here.
Typing 'journalctl -fl' instead of 'journalctl -f' is not a big effort, and ellipsization is very much a matter of personal preference. But, indeed, I'd say that --full is more useful as default, and wouldn't mind seeing it changed for journalctl (but not for systemctl status).
(In reply to Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek from comment #1) > Typing 'journalctl -fl' instead of 'journalctl -f' is not a big effort, and > ellipsization is very much a matter of personal preference. But, indeed, I'd > say that --full is more useful as default, and wouldn't mind seeing it > changed for journalctl (but not for systemctl status). Is -l an alias for --full on newer journalctl? On F19, it doesn't work. At the _very_ least, we should make sure that all documentation about "tail -f /var/log/messages" says "journalctl
The truncation is really annoying, and I agree that it would be much more useful if this were disabled by default.
(In reply to Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek from comment #1) > Typing 'journalctl -fl' instead of 'journalctl -f' is not a big effort, and > ellipsization is very much a matter of personal preference. But, indeed, I'd > say that --full is more useful as default, and wouldn't mind seeing it > changed for journalctl (but not for systemctl status). Yeah, I'm fine with ellipsizing status, but for replacing tail -f ..., the -f should behave in roughly the same way - no truncating.
One more vote for not truncating by default. Default to the most useful behaviour. Truncating is very non-useful; almost all lines are wider than my terminal width. A lot of people still use 80x24 terminals out of habit, though there's no particularly good _reason_ to do so.
This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 20 development cycle. Changing version to '20'. More information and reason for this action is here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping/Fedora20
Default flipped to --full in http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/commit/?id=2b8f688.
I'm including the change to --full by default for F21, but not earlier ones.