Hi Joe,
good to read you and welcome on the dev list! You're free to work on
issues that attract your attention. Nobody's going to force you to work
on things you don't deem to be worth the effort.
We've already decided to gradually drop official support for ancient
.net frameworks like .NET 1.X. We are no longer going to actively
maintain those targets and if changes to the codebase break those
targets we are no longer going to fix that unless someone else provides
a patch that restores compatibility. This means that we are shifting the
responsibility of maintenance to whoever requires the latest log4net
version to work on those ancient platforms.
Further, compact framework mostly does not support several appenders
that for example target the System.Net namespace. Please correct me if
I'm wrong, but from memory a prominent example appender is the
EmailAppender. I agree with you that it would be a great improvement if
we were able to refactor away all those #ifdef's. Unfortunately this
wish is very hard to achieve, even impossible if we wanted to stay
backwards compatible.
Backwards compatibility is the next thing I would like to mention.
log4net is a logging framework and one of the highest goods is its
backwards compatibility. If we are going to break that we must follow a
path similar to that of log4j2. In that world the old API facades the
log4j2 API and therefore migration of existing code is trivial.
Cheers and greets,Dominik
On 2016-10-18 22:42, Joe wrote:
I'm responding to Stefan's call-to-arms, though I have limited time
available, currently probably not more than a day or two a month.
Given my lack of time I would probably want to get involved in
specific short-term tasks, such as taking on issues from the issue
tracker, rather than being a driver to shape the future of log4net.
I have been involved recently in writing a custom asynchronous
appender that logs to a WebAPI, so asynchronous appenders is one area
I could get involved in.
One thing I'd personally like to see is to drop support for some
legacy platforms:
- The few .NET 1.x users left are probably adequately served by
existing versions of log4net.
- It's not onerous for .NET 2.0/3.0 users to upgrade to .NET 3.5,
so these could maybe be dropped too (existing apps don’t need to be
rebuilt; they just need to ensure 3.5 is installed).
- I've no experience with Compact Framework, but wonder whether,
given the platform restrictions, it would be better served going
forward by a separate code base with a simplified and restricted
logging framework that exposes an identical API to applications.
Doing this would make development easier, for example by allowing the
use of generics and Linq.
Which in turn might attract more developers ...
One way to approach it would be to remove the binaries for these
platforms from the next release, and only remove from the source code
if a reasonable period elapses without too much wailing and gnashing
of teeth.
