Review of Jose Armando Garcia Sancio's std.log

[Geoffrey Biggs]

On 07/03/12 11:12, Jose Armando Garcia wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 6:05 PM, Geoffrey Biggs
> <geoffrey.biggs at aist.go.jp>  wrote:
>> That approach means that if I actually do have a fatal error, I can't mark
>> it as such. It gets conflated with the non-fatal errors, both in the source
>> and in the logging output (which may, for example, be filtering for fatal
>> errors to phone someone in the middle of the night while errors just send an
>> email). Another point worth considering is that I cannot use the fatal level
>> and be able to re-compile my software with logging disabled, because that
>> will change the program flow.
>>
> Fatal and Critical severity cannot be disabled either at runtime or at
> compile. In other words fatal log messages will always assert(true)
> and critical log messages will always throw.
>
>> Forcing the two semantic concepts (logging and error handling) together
>> needlessly restricts the ways the library can be used. It is nice to
>> encapsulate frequent patterns, but providing a convenience function that
>> throws an error, or a new level ("terminate" or something) is a better
>> approach than forcing that pattern on everyone. Based on the name, it's a
>> *logging* library, not an error handling library.
>>
> Fatal and critical are these convenience functions.

OK, I took another look at the docs. I see your point now. Sorry for 
making a fuss.

However, I think that in this case, the log levels usable without 
killing the program are too coarse. This may be a matter of taste, though.

Geoff