But not all of those *need to*. At least until now they have needed to, but going forward they may not need to if we are giving them an slf4j impl to hang their hat off.
There will always be some special case plugins that have a legitimate need to do funky logging stuff. We need a strategy for those plugins. Jason's proposal for those cases was that they should fork a JVM. That works if you don't need to channel objects back and forth. For some of the plugins wanting to do 'live development' style work (I am thinking my jszip.org experiments - I have some plans and experiments that I haven't even pushed to there yet ;-) ) forking a JVM is a bad plan, as you then have to basically resort to RMI to control the forked JVM... More ports and more sockets and more complexity. The next step I could see is building a fresh classloader up from scratch within the plugin. That *should* work as long as we load a fresh set of slf4j-api classes (ceki?) then we are initialising slf4j a second time in the fresh classloader and we can do as we need. Again complex though one could argue less complex than the RMI route. Plugin developers following this route will have to watch out for the dreaded CCE but at least you are not having to deal with object serialisation and RMI The final proposal that I see is where we give a metadata flag (defaults to false) which if true sets up an isolated classloader for the plugin allowing the plugin to use its own slf4j Note that each proposal above retains the option for plugin developers to use the previous proposal. My vote is that we need to provide a utility library that makes the first and second proposals facile for plugin developers and we should probably enable the third option also. The correct respecting of tool chains support requires plugin developers to follow the first route if a tool chain JVM is applied to their plugin and to use the second when no tool chain JVM is in play... At least for the jetty:run and tomcat:run style plugins. For the sonar style plugins, and my gut says the vast majority of these use cases the most they will need is the third proposal. Without seeing a maven-fork-utils api I cannot say that we don't need the third proposal, so I am forced to conclude that we should support it... IOW I think we need a metadata flag. -Stephen On Friday, 7 December 2012, Mark Struberg wrote: > basically all stuff which integrates maven does *funky logging stuff*... > > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > > From: Anders Hammar <and...@hammar.net <javascript:;>> > > To: Maven Developers List <dev@maven.apache.org <javascript:;>> > > Cc: > > Sent: Friday, December 7, 2012 7:25 AM > > Subject: Re: [VOTE] Maven 3.1.0 > > > >> I'm interested to help working on adding a metadata to enable slf4j > >> visibility > >> from a plugin: by default, slf4j is not visible, plugins are expected > to > >> use > >> plugin-api's Log. But if the plugin wants to use core's slf4j, he > > would be > >> able to add an annotation in the goal requiring shared core slf4j, > then the > >> plugin descriptor would enable slf4j api import from core. > >> > > > > *If* we go this path, I think the default should be the other way around. > > I.e., the default would be to use core's slf4j and it's impl. So the > > plugin > > developer needs to do an active choice to go outside Maven's logging. > Sure, > > this could imply problems with existing plugins doing funky logging stuff > > (like the Sonar plugin), but I don't really see a problem with those > > plugins having to release a new version. I think it's more important that > > we get good defaults than trying to make every existing plugin work as > they > > are implemented right now. > > > > /Anders > > > > > >> > >> Stephen: is this what you have in mind? > >> > >> Regards, > >> > >> Hervé > >> > >> Le vendredi 30 novembre 2012 12:20:35 Stephen Connolly a écrit : > >> > I tend to agree. There are two use-cases I see that a plugin has for > >> > bundling a logging implementation: > >> > > >> > 1. They are wanting to shunt the logs from the build tool they are > >> invoking > >> > on to the user. Typically if they are being good plugins they just > > take > >> the > >> > logging output and shunt it onto org.apache.maven.plugin.Log.info() > >> > > >> > 2. They are wanting to shunt the logs from the build tool (or more > > likely > >> > app server) to a separate file, or tweak the level of logs higher > than > >> INFO > >> > for that app server/mojo execution as it will just drown the user. > >> > > >> > In the first use case, Jason's point is correct. They > > shouldn't need to > >> > bundle a logging implementation any more. > >> > > >> > The second case, Jason is arguing that they shouldn't be using the > > Maven > >> > JVM for running that tool, they should be running it in a forked JVM > > and > >> > then they can configure the logging in that JVM. I disagree. Forking > a > >> JVM > >> > for every little build tool just to control its logging is going to > > kill > >> > the build time. > >> > > >> > My preference is for a metadata flag that says: Oy! I know what > > I'm doing > >> > with logging, so don't pass logging on to me. > >> > > >> > While it feels like a "special case" the truth is logging is > > always, and > >> > always will be, a special case! > >> > > >> > -Stephen > >> > > >> > On 30 November 2012 12:09, Benson Margulies > > <bimargul...@gmail.com> > >> wrote: > >> > > On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 11:05 PM, Jason van Zyl > > <ja...@tesla.io> > >> wrote: > >> > > > On Nov 29, 2012, at 5:56 PM, Benson Margulies > > <bimargul...@gmail.com > >> > > >> > > > >> > > wrote: > >> > > >>> Currently I'm of the mind that if you make a > > Maven plugin that uses > >> > > > >> > > something that employs SLF4J then the best practice is to only > > use the > >> API > >> > > and let the host choose the implementation, in our case Maven. > > Relying > >> on > >> > > SLF4J implementation specifics in a system you're embedded in > > is not > >> good > >> > > e.g. Logback in Sonar running in Maven using SLF4J Simple. If y