Hi all! This is kinda hard to word, so hopefully this is clear. I'm not really demanding a change, but if people agree I think it would be good going forwards:
Say you're writing an Elixir library (which may or may not have an application started), and you have something which might do something worth noting. You don't know if it's relevant yet, but if it happens in userland (i.e. when someone downloaded your lib from Hex) it would be good to know, even just for context. Think of the use case where someone sees weird behaviour and you need to look at these types of logs to check it out; but they're too noisy to be on by default. The lowest level we have available to us is debug, which still appears by default. Nobody wants potentially noisy logs by default. Therefore, I'd like to suggest any of the following (although I'm really opening this thread for a generally good solution): 1. Debug should not log by default (i.e. the default application log level should be info). This is very familiar coming from other languages, and actually fits the name more (if something logs when you're not debugging, it's not a debug log). This is a longer term change as it's obviously "breaking". 2. Introduce a new log level designed for this use case (perhaps "trace"?) which is off by default (due to the default level being debug); i.e. a user has to turn it on to see any of the logs (and they're removed at compile time otherwise). This one appears to be straightforward to add in the 1.x lineage. 3. ??? you tell me, I'm not really sure how else to deal with it currently. I'd expect that a lot of readers will jump to the concept of the application configuration; but refer to the note that not all libraries have an application backing them, and having to add one just for this is a pain, along with the inevitable bindings you'll have to add for your logging. Add that to the fact that a user has to go out of their way to turn them off and it makes it an undesirable solution: "why am I seeing all of these logs?!", etc. This wouldn't be an issue with a logging level that's hidden by default. I feel like this is something lacking in the existing Logger, and it becomes especially evident when coming from other languages where this is straightforward (the "debug" module in Node.js is a good example of what I'd like, or any of the Java loggers). I would also note that people looking at this issue need to keep the concept of libraries/packages/modules in mind; this is not something that's relevant in your own projects as you can just change it yourself. Thanks (as ever) for all feedback! IW -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "elixir-lang-core" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/elixir-lang-core/89b48978-4a74-460a-b9ea-6b4f40d56935%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
