The infoStream stuff goes back to 1997, before there was log4j or any
other Java logging framework.
There's never been a big push to add logging to Lucene. It would add a
dependency, and Lucene's jar has always been standalone, which is nice.
Dependencies can conflict. If Lucene requires one version of a
dependency, then it may not work well with code that require a different
version of that dependency.
And it hasn't been clear which framework to adopt. Log4j is the
granddaddy, then there's Java logging and commons logging. Today the
preferred framework is probably SLF4J. Good thing we didn't choose the
wrong one years ago!
And how many log entries would folks really want to see per query or
document indexed? In production I don't think most folks want to see
more than one entry per query or document indexed. So finer-grained
logging would be for debugging. For that one can instead use a
debugger. Hence the traditional lack of demand for detailed logging in
Lucene.
That's the history as I recall it. The future is less clear.
Doug
Grant Ingersoll wrote:
I think the main motivation has always been to have no dependencies in
the core so as to keep it as fast and lightweight as possible. Then, of
course, there is always the usual religious wars around which logging
framework to use, not to mention the nightmare that is trying to manage
multiple logging frameworks across several projects that are being
integrated. Then, of course, there is the question of how useful any
core Lucene logs would be to users writing search applications. For the
most part, my experience has been that I want logging to tell me when a
document was added, when searches occur, etc. but I don't necessarily
need to know things like the fact that Lucene is now entering the
analysis phase of Document inversion. And, for all these needs, I can
just as well do that logging in the application and not in Lucene.
All that is not to say we couldn't add in logging, I'm just suggesting
reasons I can think of for why it has not been added to date and why I
am not sure it needs to be there going forward. I believe various other
people have contributed reasons in the past. I seem to recall Doug
spelling some out, but don't have the thread handy.
-Grant
On Dec 5, 2008, at 1:17 PM, Shai Erera wrote:
Hi
I was wondering why doesn't the Lucene code uses Java logging, instead
of the infoStream set in IndexWriter? Today, if I want to enable
tracing of Lucene code, the only thing I can do is set an infoStream,
but then I get many many messages. Moreoever, those messages seem to
cover indexing code only.
I hope to get some opinions on the use of Java logging instead of
infoStream, and hopefully to start addind logging messages in other
places in the code (like during search, query parsing etc.)
I feel that this is an approach the community has to decide on before
we start adding messages to the code. Using Java logging can greatly
benefit tracing of indexing applications who use Lucene. If the vote
is +1 for using Java logging, we can start by deprecating infoStream
(in 2.9, remove in 3.0) and use logging instead.
What do you think?
Shai
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