I'm no binary-compatibility expert, but I can't see how we can maintain it while dropping Category. I'm beginning to think that we (log4j community) are very much as Elias pointed out. Stuck with marking it as deprecated, but 'forever' keeping it. Putting aside technical aspects of keeping things clean, all we would do is alienate the community. There's no point having a rockin' API if everyone has been burnt by it and moved on to other things.It would really seem that there has been no attempt along these lines to date. logj4 1.3 is currently only an alpha so issues are to be expected at this point, *but* I believe binary compatibility and removal of Category and Priority are mutually exclusive. [I'd be happy to be proven wrong on this.] The best one could seemingly achieve is introduction of a log4j 1.2.xx release which binaries compiled agianst will also work with log4j 1.3. If binaries built against any currently existing 1.2.x release are to be supported then we have to keep Category and Priority around as I see it.
I think we as a dev team should highlight that this is a primary goal of the 1.3 release or explicitly mention that we're not.If this is not to be a goal, then *please* place all the classes under other package names and clearly document this situation.I do not believe such a fragmentation of the log4j ecosystem is justified or productive, however.
That is the last thing I'd like to see..
If we are going to aim for compatibility then Jess' reports are disturbing (putting the tone of the email aside, the content is sounding valid at first glance).I apologize for the tone.I have spent a great deal of time converting a great deal of legacy logging code and infrastructure to (directly, no JCL) use log4j and creating my own JMX MBeans to manage all manage and monitor log4j (due to a number of deeply rooted issues I encountered in log4j's own MBeans).After all of this, I am now confronted with deadlocks vs. the 1.3 issues -- a rock-and-a-hard-place which is more than a bit distressing!
I understand completely. You've probably had lots of road-rage at this point. My experience is that keeping your tone lighter will get your end results a lot quicker! :)
On a side note, you mentioned you have done a lot of work in the JMX area for log4j.. Would you be interested in floating what you have done to the community, and if we think it's good, consider donating it? (it's a bit of a legal process, and likely to require your company to sign something).
cheers, Paul
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