Great summary Benson, I agree with your assessments here.
On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 12:16 PM, Benson Margulies <bimargul...@gmail.com>wrote: > Since not much has been heard on the 'pick a logger' question for some > time, I'm going to stick my neck out and try to summarize some > aspects, in the hopes of discovering how close we are to a consensus. > > In the following, I use the word 'want' to express *preference*, not > non-negotiable demands. > > We all need: reasonable performance, an acceptable license (i.e. > category A or B), a stable, reliable, logger. > > Various of us want: MDCs, colorization: a package with a community > behind it, an avoidance of of EPL, to use our fellow Apache-projects' > outputs. > > We know that: java.util.logging isn't going to give us MDCs or > colorization without a great deal of effort. So I'm crossing it off in > this email. > > Now, I'm going to express an opinion based on all the email *I've* > seen. I don't claim to be right, but I wonder if people would be > willing to follow my logic. > > Once we eliminate j.u.l from consideration, our choices are logback, > log4j 1.x, and log4j 2.x. > > It seems to me that log4j 2.x is not really ready for us yet, so in > this email I'm crossing it off. If we continue to dither for another > few months, that might change. If someone disagrees, I'm sure they'll > respond. > > log4j1.x is the tried and true alternative. Colorization, however, > would require significant effort. Those of us who don't give a fig > about colourization won't be perturbed by this. > > logback, on the other hand, is very widely adopted, and no one seems > to be able to offer any *technical* objection to it. And it gives us > colorization out of the box. > > The objections to logback, then, are cultural, organizational, and/or > related to license. > > In my view, the very broad adoption of logback seems to me to > neutralize the concern that it's a one-man-band. While one person > projects present certain risks in the abstract, this particular one > seems to me not to raise them. > > In my view, objecting based on EPL is, as I wrote once before, not > appropriate. The Maven project erected a barrier to EPL dependencies > to respond to cases in which core Maven functionality was forked and > EPL-ified, or just proposed to be replaced by EPL code. The situation > with logging is simply not analogous. As a project, I don't think we > need to anticipate wanting to bring the logging system into our > source. Adding a category B logging dependency does not contribute to > the 'hollowing out' of Maven. > > As a Foundation, category B licenses are just as acceptable as > category A licenses as dependencies. (I also wonder why this barrier > was not specifically set up in terms of 'core code replaced by non-A' > instead of 'EPL'). > > If I add this all up, to me it amounts to a test. If some member(s) of > this community really, really, want to take log4j 1.x in order to 'use > Apache' or 'have a community', I think that those people should be > willing to step up and *write the code* to make log4j 1.x > feature-equivalent with logback for our purposes. The same logic would > apply to j.u.l, though my impression is that there is no practical > coding path that gets to equivalence. > > I trust that this email will inspire response; perhaps it will inspire > a response that allows us to detect some consensus. > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@maven.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@maven.apache.org > >
