On Tue, 31 May 2011 15:09:07 -0400, Steven Schveighoffer
<schvei...@yahoo.com> wrote:
On Tue, 31 May 2011 14:48:57 -0400, Andrei Alexandrescu
<seewebsiteforem...@erdani.org> wrote:
I'm operating under the assumption that logCritical and logFatal are at
a different log level (i.e. the primary function of a logging facility
is to have different degrees of importance, which you can turn on or off
depending on the level set). Is that not the case? So I can't have a
situation where logError does nothing, but logCritical logs a message?
Rereading the docs, it seems that fatal is actually a separate level, so I
still assert this is not a good design. I should be able to access all
levels without having the program abort or throw an exception.
I also note that critical is nowhere to be seen in the docs. Am I missing
something?
If we change fatal and critical to be the same level as error (and
enabled/disabled with error), I think it would be more sensible than what
you have proposed. It could be argued that it's not enough levels.
Typically, I've only needed 4 levels with logging:
fatal errors -- print a message then exit the application (gracefully!).
You cannot disable this level.
non-fatal errors -- print a message but the program continues.
info -- print a message for information so the flow of execution can be
followed (i.e. xyz logged in, xyz executed this program, etc.)
debug -- print all details, down to printouts of internal
structures/protocols.
I've never had much use for a warning level.
It helps with the debug level to allow selectively turning on levels in
certain areas. For example, I had an application which was a tftp server
as well as a server for another protocol. When I was writing the TFTP
portion, I needed to see the exact packets sent over the wire, but for
TFTP only. It was easy to do with log4net, I could just configure that
class' logger to be at the debug level (without recompilation). But I
wouldn't consider such a feature a requirement for a logging library. I
think we should try and focus on the most common and useful aspects of
logging for the built-in logger. Seems similar to unittest -- good enough
for most cases, and simple enough that it's used everywhere.
-Steve
