Thanks for the response. I don't think there's any rush to remove the ifdefs for obsolete platforms ; the important thing is to know we don't need to add them for new code.
As a minor example I recently contributed code which measured elapsed time using DateTime.UtcNow: I'd probably have used a Stopwatch had I known .NET 1.x support was not required. By implication you are planning to continue to target .NET 2.0 so presumably the rules are: - Avoid using features from .NET 3.5+ in core components - It's OK to depend on .NET 3.5 for new loosely-coupled components such as Appenders - in this case the whole file just needs to be included in an #ifdef I'll start off by looking at LOGNET-407 as suggested by Stefan. From: Dominik Psenner [mailto:dpsen...@apache.org] Sent: 19 October 2016 10:29 To: log4net-dev@logging.apache.org Subject: Re: Response to call to arms Hi Joe, good to read you and welcome on the dev list! You're free to work on issues that attract your attention. Nobody's going to force you to work on things you don't deem to be worth the effort. We've already decided to gradually drop official support for ancient .net frameworks like .NET 1.X. We are no longer going to actively maintain those targets and if changes to the codebase break those targets we are no longer going to fix that unless someone else provides a patch that restores compatibility. This means that we are shifting the responsibility of maintenance to whoever requires the latest log4net version to work on those ancient platforms. Further, compact framework mostly does not support several appenders that for example target the System.Net namespace. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but from memory a prominent example appender is the EmailAppender. I agree with you that it would be a great improvement if we were able to refactor away all those #ifdef's. Unfortunately this wish is very hard to achieve, even impossible if we wanted to stay backwards compatible. Backwards compatibility is the next thing I would like to mention. log4net is a logging framework and one of the highest goods is its backwards compatibility. If we are going to break that we must follow a path similar to that of log4j2. In that world the old API facades the log4j2 API and therefore migration of existing code is trivial. Cheers and greets,Dominik On 2016-10-18 22:42, Joe wrote: I'm responding to Stefan's call-to-arms, though I have limited time available, currently probably not more than a day or two a month. Given my lack of time I would probably want to get involved in specific short-term tasks, such as taking on issues from the issue tracker, rather than being a driver to shape the future of log4net. I have been involved recently in writing a custom asynchronous appender that logs to a WebAPI, so asynchronous appenders is one area I could get involved in. One thing I'd personally like to see is to drop support for some legacy platforms: - The few .NET 1.x users left are probably adequately served by existing versions of log4net. - It's not onerous for .NET 2.0/3.0 users to upgrade to .NET 3.5, so these could maybe be dropped too (existing apps don't need to be rebuilt; they just need to ensure 3.5 is installed). - I've no experience with Compact Framework, but wonder whether, given the platform restrictions, it would be better served going forward by a separate code base with a simplified and restricted logging framework that exposes an identical API to applications. Doing this would make development easier, for example by allowing the use of generics and Linq. Which in turn might attract more developers ... One way to approach it would be to remove the binaries for these platforms from the next release, and only remove from the source code if a reasonable period elapses without too much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
