Is it just me, or is there a reason for it?

[Tom H]

On Sat, Aug 14, 2010 at 11:42 AM, R Kimber <richardkimber at btinternet.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Aug 2010 18:21:48 -0400
> Tom H wrote:
>
>> Who decides what's informative?!
>
> Of course it's a matter of judgement as to how useful the information is
> for an ordinary user.  Do you think that the examples I quoted were
> generally useful?
>
>> Have looked at the following to try to get the results that you are
>> looking for (from the man page)?
>
> Part of what I was saying is that most ordinary users will not want to, or
> be able to, master extended regular expressions.

They can be useful. The first time that I saw the udev message, I
asked colleagues and googled the net to find out what it was because
as a sysadmin, I want to know what a box is warning me about or
whether it is erroring or not.

You installed logcheck and are therefore seeing these logs when an
"ordinary user" would not, unless he/she decided to poke around
/var/log (if there is some GNOME/KDE gui for checking logs). So, an
"ordinary user" who installs would then be faced with the choice of
putting up with the frequency and verbosity, finding regexes online
that suit his needs, or writing his/her own regexes.

There is a reason for such a (relatively) user-unfriendly default in
all OSs. Have you ever looked at Windows or OS X logs? They are just
as (relatively) obtuse because they are not meant for "ordinary users"
but for people who understand them (or who can try to understand
them).