Code review comment for lp:~eric97/bzr/mutter-pid

On Sun, 2011-01-09 at 02:16 +0000, Martin Pool wrote:
> On 8 January 2011 09:26, John A Meinel <email address hidden> wrote:
> > I don't find the absolute date-time to be very useful, when with
> > pid+elapsed time+log at startup time you can get it if you need to.

I've got Python logging to emit the elapsed time. Not nearly as
hard as I'd thought; I just hadn't found the right knob yet :-)

That means that format 5 above is feasible. To repeat it:
    [21703] 1.234 MUTTER: Plugin name launchpad already loaded
    [21703] 1.236 WARNING: bzr: warning: blah

Or leaving out the "MUTTER:" gives format 6 (but see below):
    [21703] 1.234 Plugin name launchpad already loaded
    [21703] 1.236 WARNING: bzr: warning: blah

> Possibly we should only log the full time when it's for say a server
> log, and then it should probably go to syslog. For the common cases
> of just .bzr.log it should not run long enough to matter.

I think what you're saying is that:
  - "bzr server" and the like should write to syslog instead of to
    .bzr.log (in which case, IIUC, the format isn't bzr's
    decision, but rather the syslog server's)

  - other subcommands should write (only) elapsed times to .bzr.log

Have I got that right?

Does bzr currently log to anywhere other than .bzr.log? If so,
obviously I need to avoid breaking that.

> The word "warning" has some meaning to the user to say
> that it's not been fatal etc, but "mutter" is just a random internal
> bit.

True. What the "MUTTER:" does do, though, is eliminate a special
case from the log-file syntax, and in general I dislike special
cases and try to avoid them. In particular, I find log files
easier to read if the columns line up; and if I want to use a
complicated grep on one, or even slurp it into a spreadsheet,
variant line syntaxes need to be worked around. (Admittedly,
this last point is more important for long-lived servers.)

That said, in this case your collective opinion far outweighs
mine, since you spend a lot more time staring at these logs
than I do. I'm happy to implement whatever consensus y'all
come up with.

  - Eric