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As you may have seen I added a cvsignore file in the src directory. The idea is to put a simplelog.properties (or other such configuration file) in the src/private-resources directory so you can configure the SimpleLog logger from Commons Logging.
My current simplelog.properties looks like this: org.apache.commons.logging.simplelog.showShortLogname=false org.apache.commons.logging.simplelog.defaultlog=info org.apache.commons.logging.simplelog.log.org.apache.fop.pdf=trace
Info about simplelog.properties can be found at [1].
Well Ive created the file on my hard disk as you suggest. But shouldnt this really be kept in CVS, with default settings. Obviously users will be expected to change the defaults. If a sample file is not kept in CVS, then every user is going to have to look in archives in order to find out how to get logging turned on. I know we dont have many users of HEAD yet, but I want us to consider what is going to happen longer term .....
One additional thing is to add a system property to each startup configuration in your IDE where you need to configure logging. Working with Eclipse I've added...
-Dorg.apache.commons.logging.Log=org.apache.commons.logging.impl.SimpleLog
We would need to add this to FOP.sh or FOP.bat in CVS
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For setting up Commons Logging for a command-line application, please see PFMReader and TTFReader for how I think it should be done. I'm not entirely comfortable, yet, as SimpleLog logs everything to System.err. For Barcode4J I wrote a special ConsoleLogger (for Avalon Logging) [4] that logs only WARN, ERROR and FATAL levels to System.err while sending the rest to System.out. Also, there's no possibility to get rid of the log level prefix in SimpleLog. In the end, it would probably be best to create a special CommandLineLog class which is tailored to this use case.
Will embedded users be able to write a Logger that overrides the default SimpleLog, and captures the output to file, rather than System.err?
Chris
