[Jeremias]
Hi Finn,
I took a look at it and I must say that I'm a bit confused, too.
Anyway, I have a proposal to make. I would expect a command-line application to work like any other C-program such as "grep", "svn", "ls" or whatever. That means you don't get any "[INFO]" before each line, but you can define the log level (normally "quiet", "normal" and "verbose") through command line switches. That'll work for most CLI-users.
Since the Fop class is the one to control the whole application it (or rather the CommandLineOptions class) can also set up C-L to behave exactly as explained above. That would probably mean not to use SimpleLog but to provide a special implementation for command-line use. At any rate, I don't agree with the way that SimpleLog is implemented. Informational messages should go to System.out, errors to System.err. Logging prefixes should be disabled. I've had to do the same for Avalon Logging in Barcode4J [1] and I'm very pleased with the result. Using this I was able to implement the Barcode4J CLI in a way that the generated barcode could be output to System.out which may also be desirable for certain people. You could even modify the whole thing in way that you could implement FOP as a filter application getting the input through System.in and sending the output to System.out, giving error messages through System.err.
For those who know about C-L and want to do some special logging we could have a command line switch that disables our special logger setup. They can fully control C-L from outside.
For the cases where FOP is used embedded in a bigger software, FOP shouldn't manipulate anything in C-L, it's simply the developer's job to set up C-L from outside.
WDYT?
I like it. It will get consistent results for command line users without them (practicly) ever having to do any logging configuration.
I have added a patch with an implementation of your proposal. Feel free to point out any mistakes that I have made.
Glen, I'm a bit confused about your objections. I don't think they apply to Jeremias' proposal at all.
- SimpleLog plays *no* part in this. - There is no wrapping of c-l in any way, we just supply own very simple specialized logging implementation. - Users can still use other c-l loggers (jdk14, log4j, etc.) by setting LOGCHOICE in fop.bat
regards, finn
