Review of Jose Armando Garcia Sancio's std.log

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Monday, February 13, 2012 16:50:04 David Nadlinger wrote: 
> Please post all feedback in this thread, and remember: Although
> comprehensive reviews are obviously appreciated, short comments are very
> welcome as well!

Why does vlog even exist? It's a needless complication IMHO. Let the log 
levels manage what does and doesn't get logged. I see no reason to add the 
concept of verbosity on top of that. It's a needless complication.

Also, _please_ add a debug level. Personally, I'd argue for simply copying 
syslog's levels and matching them, since ideally any logging on Linux would be 
going to syslog anyway. But there are good reasons to have messages beyond 
info. I sure wouldn't want _all_ messages which don't indicate a problem in 
the app to be marked as info. For instance, what if I want to have info 
displayed in release mode but want greater verbosity in debug mode? I'd need 
another log level which isn't there. Using the concept of verbosity to try and 
handle this is a needless complication. syslog has

#define	LOG_EMERG	0	/* system is unusable */
#define	LOG_ALERT	1	/* action must be taken immediately */
#define	LOG_CRIT	2	/* critical conditions */
#define	LOG_ERR		3	/* error conditions */
#define	LOG_WARNING	4	/* warning conditions */
#define	LOG_NOTICE	5	/* normal but significant condition */
#define	LOG_INFO	6	/* informational */
#define	LOG_DEBUG	7	/* debug-level messages */

And I'd like to at least see notice and debug added.

While we're at it, what's the point of dfatal? Why on earth would a _fatal_ 
condition not be fatal if it were in release mode if it were fatal in debug 
mode? Is it fatal or not? It seems to me like another needless complication.

If you're going to have write, then have writef, not format. Then it's 
actually consistent with our normal I/O functions. Also, do writef and format 
automatically append a newline? If so, then they should be writeln and 
writefln.

Rich is a horrible name IMHO. It says nothing about what it actually is or 
does. I'm not sure what a good name would be (BoolMessage?, LogResult?), but 
Rich by itself is very confusing and utterly uninformative.

And why does Configuration's logger property throw if you set it after a 
logging call has been made. Is it really that inconceivable that someone would 
swap out loggers at runtime? Or is the idea that you'd swap out the 
Configuration?

- Jonathan M Davis