[nant-dev] Nant XmlLogger

Nicklas Norling Sat, 20 Nov 2004 02:37:54 -0800

Title: Message

Hi.

I have a few questions and thoughts about the XmlLogger facility in NAnt. I'm currently been using 11-15 nightly

but basically as long as I've used the XmlLogger to provide data for CCNet there have been all kinds of problems

with this logging. As 0.85 seem to draw closer I thought I'd better brought this up before the release rather then

after.

These are the main problems:

1. None-functional XML structure.

This is only indirectly getting me into trouble as other tools relying on the Nant XML file can not figure out what's

failing and what's not due to the information structure (or so I've been told). I wonder what lovely things CCNet and

other teams could do if this worked.

2. Log file size.

I have around 2 MB large logs after each build. Due to item 1 above developers do often not get to know what went wrong

from the CCNet so they have to look at the raw log using i.e. IE (please note the rime). Over a 100 MBit connection

this takes around 15-30 seconds depending on the computer. But lots of our devs (several hundreds) are using this

over a 512k line. It takes ages to load the log file for them and it's also a very slow process to find the relevant information

at times.

3. Verbosity

Most of the 2 MB log file consists of spam. Empty tags denoting a task running. Worthless INFO and DEBUG style entries.

Let me take some examples by giving you a walkthrough of my builds.

My main build script begins with a clean task to remove the old build artifacts. Here is the snipplet:

And the log it procuces.

                              <target name="clean">
                                <task name="foreach">
                                  <task name="">
                                    <task name="delete">
                                      <message level="Info"><![CDATA[Deleting directory 'C:\CodeModules\Test\Montgomery\modules\fndadm\client\EventAdministration\bin'.]]></message>
                                    </task>
                                  </task>
                                  <task name="">
                                    <task name="delete">
                                      <message level="Info"><![CDATA[Deleting directory 'C:\CodeModules\Test\Montgomery\modules\fndadm\client\EventAdministration\obj'.]]></message>
                                    </task>
                                  </task>
....

All of those log entries sums up to quite a few. But what for? The only need I can see is if the task failed, but it's not.

A programmer would probably like to see that his delete task is finding it's target and that the code gets ran, but as

a end user of nant it becomes an annoyance to have to scroll through.

Next my build fetches the latest code from cvs. This time I'm actually interested in what comes out as that will eventually

get transformed by CCNet into a build mail and a web page. Here's the snipplet:

When this task is logged normal information from CVS is logged as warnings:

CCNet thinking it better alert me will transform this into the Warning section of the email and webpage. But it's an informal message.

Now it's time to do the actual compile. I'm using the <solution> task:

This is the log result for one of the project (the solution contains around 30 of them):

This then continues with the rest of the 70 or so solutions we have. I can understand that the solution task needs to copy

references local, but do the log really need to have each and every copy logged without any info in it? To me a failure to

copy is quite enough.

If the project contains a resx file (or several) the resgen task logs each compile:

I don't see any usage for any of this information. Once again it seems to me it's giving a programmer good debug info but a

builder is having a hard time sorting out the important stuff.

I'm estimating 1/3 of the file is filled with the debug info from the solution task.

Next after the build is complete I run FxCop. In order to do that no matter what machine I'm reading the registry to find the key.

This snipplet does it:

Note the failonerror="false". This is what ends up in the log when the key can not be found (normal thing as it can be installed as Me or for All).

This needless to say also ends up in the Error section of CCNet build mails/web page.

Next FxCop encounters one of our projects that hasn't got a reference set up correctly. This is what the Exec task ends up logging:

....

I'm aware of this problem but there isn't much I can do about it at this time. It will still analys the rest of the code so I wan't it to run.

I figure the only sane thing to do is setting failonerror="false". This gives the same problem as above. Another Error in CCNet.

Is there anything that can be done to improve the situation before the release? I think that a lot of people would appretiate

that a lot. With the very high quality 0.85 has a good chance of sustaining I find it very likely lots of people will not run as much

on nightlys as they have. And with a release cycle of around a year it seems shame that the logging isn't in a better shape then

it is now.

Am I way off here?

/Nicke

[nant-dev] Nant XmlLogger

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