Hi,
I was told to come defend myself here. Way too many messages to read in
archive and considering nature of the "discussion" I bet I can guess what
some of the issues were.
Just under a year ago Ceki decided to bring Log4j to Apache. There was some
legal (non-)issues which took a while to resolve. During this whole time I
was a very strong advocate of this and sent a bunch of email to Stefano/Ceki
cheering them on etc.
Ceki asked me to have a look at it and make suggestions. So I spent a few
hours working over it and sent a bunch of suggestions to Ceki. Most of the
suggestions were things that LogKit implemented but Log4j didn't. Most of
these things got implemented. This repeated another time IIRC.
Later Stefano wanted us to use Log4j inside Avalon and drop LogKit. However
Log4j wasn't (and still isn't) suitable for these environments. It has some
fairly poor performance characteristerics if you make use of deep
hierarchies. It is also porous. Once you get access to a Category you get
access to the whole system. You can masquarade, and mess with logging. Want
to redirect "auth" messages to /dev/null - easy. And as almost every Log4j
users uses the default hierarchy ... that is faar worse. You can not trust
anything the Log4j system logs. I tried to get Ceki to change these things -
no luck - was stonewalled.
So next I tried to get him interested in rebuilding the whole system - kinda
like Log4J version 2. He never responded - I assumed it was pointless to try
to convince him otherwise. Then I tried a last ditch effort to share backend
(Appenders/LogTargets, Events etc) - but apparently he never received this
email.
Hence why LogKit continued to exist - however I was still hoping that it or
Logging JSR would become acceptable. Thanks to Cekis campaign the Logging JSR
is now good enough unfortunately limited to jdk1.4.
A bit back back Ceki decided to proclaim me a liar, thief and a parasite.
Apparently those things that LogKit has in common with Log4j were stolen from
their community (despite being implemented first in LogKit and added into
Log4j). Ironically even recently, after LogKit made a release with a new
feature (ContextMaps), withing 24 hours Log4j aquired the equivelent (MDC). I
assume Ceki would claim they came up with it independently or one of their
users suggested it or something similar. Curious that I am considered the
parasite despite originating many of these ideas, huh?
The other thing that may have been trailed out is that LogKit is unstable
incompatible mess or some trite like that. As far as I am aware LogKit has
only broken binary compatability 3 times - all of them when it was alpha
software.
* once pre-apache
* once when fede experimented in main tree and changes were later backed out
* once when change from alpha-beta status
I am sure there is someone willing to call me a liar - but whats the bet they
arn't willing to provide any proof? ;)
Anyways I just wasted 30 minutes writing this and probably won't respond to
the trolls that are likely to arise. All I want is a secure fast logging
toolkit.
--
Cheers,
Pete
*-----------------------------------------------------*
* "Faced with the choice between changing one's mind, *
* and proving that there is no need to do so - almost *
* everyone gets busy on the proof." *
* - John Kenneth Galbraith *
*-----------------------------------------------------*
