I don't want to be dismissive but these are just a bunch of excuses. Sure, the objections are all reasonable and all, but at the end of the day they boil down to excuses preventing forward movement.
Fortunately, this is open source where we can take our marbles and play elsewhere.
At 03:16 5/1/2005, Mark Womack wrote:
This is a spinoff of the discussion regarding slf4j and log4j. I reviewed Curt's email on the 1.2 branch changes, and I am building on some of his comments.
I am not a member of the slf4j team, so I cannot speak to it's goals, etc. As a log4j committer I have no opposition to it being directly implemented/supported in the log4j classes, however, I think that doing that implementation in the log4j 1.2 branch at this point is premature.
Even though slf4j inherits everything from the former log4j UGLI interfaces, it seems to me that part of its reason for existence is to foster some common, neutral area where the members of the Logging Services team, the JCL team, and others can work out whatever issues they felt they could not work out within the walls of Apache. As such, I expect that there are going to be some number of changes to the base slf4j framework. Looking at the slf4j list archives, those discussions have yet to really kick into gear. As Curt pointed out, slf4j has only existed as an entity for a couple of weeks.
Given that, I don't think that the log4j project should provide an official implementation of the slf4j interface until:
1) There is an official release from the slf4j organization. Basing our official releases on a single slf4j beta release version is not good.
2) There is demonstrated consensus from the slf4j organization. I want some understanding that their (future) release version attains whatever goals they have set and that they do not expect it to change significantly in the future. If this was an effort within Apache, trying to achieve a common interface/api, I would have the same requirements (though I think it would be easier, quite frankly). I use the word "consensus" because I expect there to be a group of developers deciding the slf4j fate.
So, while I don't think we should allow an official release of either log4j 1.2.X or 1.3 with slf4j changes until the criteria above are met, I do think that providing some kind of slf4j log4j implementation based on the current slf4j api would be fine. It should be a separate release from either of the log4j releases and it would be appropriately labeled as "experimental" or whatever we want to call it. There would be an understanding that we (log4j) support the slf4j effort and we are working with slf4j to provide an implementation, but that the work is in progress. The work could be done on it's own branch. We can wrangle through the details of implementation directly or an efficient facade. I still want to understand what slf4j means to the JCL.
I support the slf4j effort, especially if it solves the issues we have seen related to JCL. Rushing an implementation of it, even though based on the UGLI code that we know and love(d), is not right. Now it is with a group that is outside of ours, in what appears to be a exploratory mode, we have to take some care in that implementing it affects our log4j api. Even once we release an official version, whatever form it takes, if there are changes to the slf4j api, it should be treated as any other supported log4j feature. I certainly would not want to start doing many mini-releases of log4j around api tweak changes in slf4j. That is why I want some assurance that the slf4j is "baked".
I say "slf4j organization", but it is just wierd since everyone in that "organization" is from log4j, and I suppose the JCL team(though I could not find a list of committers for slf4j). It is still unclear to me exactly why folks felt it had to move outside of Apache, but that is a different discussion, and we are where we are.
-Mark
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