Hi, There are two changes to node that I'm considering contributing. Before I get started, I wanted to get some guidance on whether these things might ever be accepted into master.
*1. allow reassigning of console.log (and console.error, etc.) to other output streams* * * Right now (as far as I can tell) the console logging functions always write to the original stdout or stderr streams that the process was passed at creation. I believe it would be nice to be able to reassign these to any stream object. The use case for me is when node is launched as a child process and stdout is used for IPC with the parent. It's annoying to write an IPC protocol that's tolerant to random strings getting written to stdout (via spurious console.logs in packages I didn't write). An alternative to allowing this reassignment could be to have a call that sets all console logging functions to write to stderr. (Then stdout would be left free for IPC.) This might be drastically simpler. A few questions: - Where should the API call go? The 'util' package? And, any guidance on what the API should be? - Right now, writes to stdout/stderr are usually blocking. Would we be opening up a can of worms by trying to have console.log write to streams in non-blocking ways? - If we consider this change, would we also change the logging functions in the 'util' package? Would we allow the user to switch each separately, or would console.log/util.log always write to the same place (and the same for console.error/util.error)? - Are there logging functions other than console.log/info/debug/error and util.debug/error/puts/print/log? *2. allow enabling the V8 debugger programmatically (from a JS call)* * * Right now, one can "hackily" enable the V8 debugger from JS by doing: process.kill(process.pid, "SIGUSR1"); However, this doesn't provide any feedback: the caller has no way of knowing if/when the debugger is enabled, nor any notification of why enabling failed (e.g. because port 5858 is already open in another process). Additionally, the caller can't control what port the debugger is opened on. My use case for this is, again, in the situation where node is being run as a child process. The child process runs a server, and clients communicate over a websocket. I currently allow clients to enable debugging using the hack above (and then do the debugging using node-inspector). But, it would be nice to provide feedback to the client when it fails (and to allow the user to set alternate ports). If we consider this change, what should the API be? How about something like: process.enableDebugger([port], [callback(err)]) Thanks! -- Joel -- Job Board: http://jobs.nodejs.org/ Posting guidelines: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Mailing-List-Posting-Guidelines You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "nodejs" group. To post to this group, send email to nodejs@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to nodejs+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs?hl=en?hl=en
