+1

Allow me to make some corrections:

`XmlLayout` is dropped in Log4j 3, not in Log4j 2.

Logstash (the L in the ELK, Elasticsearch-Logstash-Kibana, stack) supports
reading logs from a file formatted using a particular pattern. You combine
Filebeat with grok filter
<https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/logstash/current/advanced-pipeline.html>
to achieve that.


On Wed, Feb 7, 2024 at 5:19 AM Scott Deboy <scott.de...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Thank you for spending time working on it Christian.
>
> I started contributing to Chainsaw in 2003. I agree. It's time.
>
> The primary benefit of Chainsaw was its built-in support for real-time
> tailing of ssh-accessible pattern-layout based logs  - something
> Kibana doesn't support well, and something no-one ever really
> understood about it.
>
> It was always a dev-focused tool - it works great for local dev, and
> works in some prod envs, if you spend enough time to get the setup to
> work.
>
> There was no great reason to move off of the log41 deps really - they
> aren't used for anything other than parsing the patternlayout, but
> log4j1 is dead, so I get it.
>
> I use it for my work, and will continue to do so, but the
> chainsaw-with-log4j1-dep branch. I may revert master back to that,
> because why not.
>
> +1
>
> Thanks again for putting up with my persistence to try and make it
> useful to folks - I appreciate it  :)
>
> Scott
>
>
> On 2/6/24, Christian Grobmeier <grobme...@apache.org> wrote:
> > Hello
> >
> > we have had Chainsaw for a long time in our product list, and I can
> totally
> > see that some - myself included - are emotionally attached to it.
> However,
> > due to my work on it, I have given it some additional thought.
> >
> > After working with the Chainsaw code base for a while, I saw that many
> > features were commented out and removed when migrating to Log4j 2.
> >
> > Some basic features, such as "Open Logfile to view it directly." were
> > removed. It is already hard to recover the functionality since
> log4j-extras
> > no longer exists. In addition, as I learned recently, Log4j 2 has removed
> > the XML Formatter. The old implementation of Chainsaw could only open
> > XML-formatted log files.
> >
> > Honestly, there is much work to make Chainsaw a working product again. I
> > mostly did refactorings and clean-ups, but I am not even through. I could
> > continue like this for two more months.
> >
> > Restoring the old functionality and making it functional again requires
> even
> > more months.
> > If we had completed it, we would have restored a Swing application,
> mostly
> > replaced by Kibana stacks.
> >
> > At this point, I don't see how we can write the tons of code necessary,
> and
> > also not how useful it would be. Either all our users are using Log4j 1,
> or
> > we don't have any users at all for Chainsaw, since it didn't work.
> >
> > For that reason, I would like to propose to move Chainsaw to dormant. If
> we
> > feel for it, we can work and fix it - we should not archive the repo.
> But I
> > would like to make clear that Chainsaw is not in good shape, and people
> > should only use it only "at their own risk."
> >
> > I would like to make clear that this proposal is not something I say
> easily,
> > but I feel it is in the best interest of our users to communicate how we
> > currently see the status of this project.
> >
> > Please note, that I don't have much time to continue to work on it in the
> > next months.
> >
> > Remembering the last discussion about this: Scott, are you OK with that
> > move? I know it's your baby, but as long as we don't have a working
> product,
> > we should move it. I am open to moving it back when we somehow get rid of
> > all the problems.
> >
> > Please let me know if one of you has an alternate proposal - we can also
> > discuss it in the next call.
> >
> > Kind regards,
> > Christian
> >
> > --
> > The Apache Software Foundation
> > V.P., Data Privacy
> >
>

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