Since not much has been heard on the 'pick a logger' question for some time, I'm going to stick my neck out and try to summarize some aspects, in the hopes of discovering how close we are to a consensus.
In the following, I use the word 'want' to express *preference*, not non-negotiable demands. We all need: reasonable performance, an acceptable license (i.e. category A or B), a stable, reliable, logger. Various of us want: MDCs, colorization: a package with a community behind it, an avoidance of of EPL, to use our fellow Apache-projects' outputs. We know that: java.util.logging isn't going to give us MDCs or colorization without a great deal of effort. So I'm crossing it off in this email. Now, I'm going to express an opinion based on all the email *I've* seen. I don't claim to be right, but I wonder if people would be willing to follow my logic. Once we eliminate j.u.l from consideration, our choices are logback, log4j 1.x, and log4j 2.x. It seems to me that log4j 2.x is not really ready for us yet, so in this email I'm crossing it off. If we continue to dither for another few months, that might change. If someone disagrees, I'm sure they'll respond. log4j1.x is the tried and true alternative. Colorization, however, would require significant effort. Those of us who don't give a fig about colourization won't be perturbed by this. logback, on the other hand, is very widely adopted, and no one seems to be able to offer any *technical* objection to it. And it gives us colorization out of the box. The objections to logback, then, are cultural, organizational, and/or related to license. In my view, the very broad adoption of logback seems to me to neutralize the concern that it's a one-man-band. While one person projects present certain risks in the abstract, this particular one seems to me not to raise them. In my view, objecting based on EPL is, as I wrote once before, not appropriate. The Maven project erected a barrier to EPL dependencies to respond to cases in which core Maven functionality was forked and EPL-ified, or just proposed to be replaced by EPL code. The situation with logging is simply not analogous. As a project, I don't think we need to anticipate wanting to bring the logging system into our source. Adding a category B logging dependency does not contribute to the 'hollowing out' of Maven. As a Foundation, category B licenses are just as acceptable as category A licenses as dependencies. (I also wonder why this barrier was not specifically set up in terms of 'core code replaced by non-A' instead of 'EPL'). If I add this all up, to me it amounts to a test. If some member(s) of this community really, really, want to take log4j 1.x in order to 'use Apache' or 'have a community', I think that those people should be willing to step up and *write the code* to make log4j 1.x feature-equivalent with logback for our purposes. The same logic would apply to j.u.l, though my impression is that there is no practical coding path that gets to equivalence. I trust that this email will inspire response; perhaps it will inspire a response that allows us to detect some consensus. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
