Csaba Nagy wrote:
On Wed, 2009-08-12 at 15:42 +0200, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
Have you actually looked at a logfile with this in it? A simple
stylesheet won't do at all. What you get is not an XML document but a
text document with little bits of XML embedded in it. So you would need
a program to parse that file and either turn it into a single legal XML
document or pass each piece of XML individually to your XSLT processor.
Bleah.
I'm pretty sure you will never find a human readable format which is
easily extracted from the logs by a program. But if you format the XML
in a (very human unreadable) one-line-without-breaks format then it will
be a lot easier extracted by a program and formatted at your will.
That will just make things worse. And it will break if the XML includes
any expression that contains a line break.
And all this because you pose a false dichotomy between correctness and
completeness on one hand and human readability on the other. I don't
accept that at all. I think we can and should improve human readability
without sacrificing anything on the correctness and completeness front.
In fact, that also needs improving, and we can do them both at the same
time.
I really really doubt that. I would go here on the UNIX approach of
piping the things through the right tools, each one doing a simple and
good job for it's single and well defined purpose. So let the explain
spit out a line of XML without much thought about formatting but
focusing on completeness, making it easy for tools to get that line, and
then let the tools do the formatting depending on what you want to do
with the information. Each part will be simpler than you would put in a
directly human readable XML (if that's possible at all) approach, which
will anyway not cover all the uses and tastes.
I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on this. I think you're
going in precisely the wrong direction.
I repeat, I want to be able to have a log file that is both machine
processable and not utterly unreadable by a human. And I do not accept
at all that this is impossible. Nor do I accept I should need some extra
processing tool to read the machine processable output without suffering
brain damage. If we were to adopt your approach I bet you would find
that nobody in their right mind would use the machine readable formats.
I sure wouldn't.
cheers
andrew
--
Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org)
To make changes to your subscription:
http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
