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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report
about I/O disciplines and I should retire to the Tassili-in-Aijer
mountains in Sahara as a camel herder :-)
-- Jarkko Hietaniemi
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Great work, and can I have stealth loggers? (Score:1)
It is really unfortunate that important CPAN modules like LWP or Rose::DB don't have usable logging mechanisms in place. Once you're used to category-based logging it's hard to go back to these home-grown and less convenient solutions.
I think it's a great idea to promote standardized logging on CPAN and letting the user choose the actual implementation will definitely help to make strides towards that goal.
By the way, I don't agree that "For small modules that want to minimize dependencies, depending on Log4perl (for example) is a non-starter." The Log4perl core doesn't have dependencies other than perl's core modules.
One thing missing from your proposal is Log4perl's :easy mode [sourceforge.net]. If you
think about it, getting a logger and calling its method is a lot of
typing, given that you just want to log something. That's why in
Log4perl you can use
DEBUG "Log this!";
and you're done. No getting a logger, no method calling, no category passing. It's all automatic. Behind the scenes, it gets a 'stealth logger' with the category set to the current package and calls the appropriate logging method on it. This feature is huge. I'm using it almost exclusively in everything I write.
Any chance of adding that?
One thing to watch out for is performance. People don't want their applications to slow down just because a module has a logging capability. Ideally, it could just be de-compiled, Log4perl has an experimental feature called resurrect [sourceforge.net] which does something along these lines, although it's somewhat hacky.
Keep up the great work!
-- Mike Schilli
Reply to This
Re: (Score:1)
> minimize dependencies, depending on Log4perl (for example) is a
> non-starter." The Log4perl core doesn't have dependencies other
> than perl's core modules.
Fair enough.
>
> One thing missing from your proposal is Log4perl's
> [sourceforge.net]. If you think about it, getting a logger and
> calling its method is a lot of typing, given that you just want
> to log something. That's why in Log4perl you can use
>
Re: (Score:1)
> package, similar to easy mode. The syntax is pretty minimal.
Ah, gotcha. So you would call
$log->debug(...)
instead of
DEBUG "..."
which is probably acceptable in terms of additional key strokes
(although it might throw off novices).
> The problem I have with the DEBUG etc keywords is that they promote
>inefficient behavior. e.g.
>
> DEBUG "Current arguments: "
Re: (Score:1)
Assertions were going to make that possible in 5.10.
Unfortunately they were recently removed from bleadperl. :-(