Re: [Banshee-List] Logging in Banshee: use log4net?

[Aaron Bockover <abockover novell com>]

I'm interested in the performance aspect of log4net. This sounds like a
heavy component to be adding. What kind of "startup" or initialization
does the component need? How expensive are the actual logging calls,
etc.

--Aaron


On Tue, 2006-11-07 at 19:19 -0800, Julien Sobrier wrote:
> Hello,
> I've seen several e-mails and changelog items that raise issues about
> logging in Banshee.
> 
> Right now, most developers seem to use Console.WriteLine for debugging
> (and sometimes check it in by accident :-) ) rather than the Banshee
> logger. There are a lot of try catch where the exception thrown is never
> logged.
> 
> Getting the right log for users is not easier. As you can see in the
> thread  "[Banshee-List] howto avoid creating dirs on flash mp3 player",
> a user has to put a Console.WriteLine at the right place in the right
> file to get critical information about an issue.
> 
> Log4net (http://logging.apache.org/log4net/) is a managed logging system
> available on both Windows and Linux that works great for Mono. It has a
> couple of nice features:
> * similar to the logger in Banshee in the way you use it:
> log4net.Debug("message"); log4net.Warning("message"); ...
> * can be configured by an XML fine. You can define what you want to log
> besides the message: thread number, time stamp, namespace, class, etc.
> * in the configuration file, you can define different type of output
> (file, database, console, SMTP, remote server, etc. or a combination of
> several outputs), what level of debug you want to output for certain
> namespaces or classes, etc.
> * the configuration file can be dynamically changed during runtime
> 
> I see a lot of advantages for both developers and users:
> * developers can put a lot more debug information that they do now, this
> make a lot easier to debug their piece of code. It would also be much
> easier for other developers to see how somebody else's ode behaves.
> * no more try catch without logging the exception
> * banshee can be shipped with a config file that logs nothing or only
> the critical debug messages
> * if a developer or a user need more debug information, he can modify
> the config file to get the logs for the class/namespace/plugin he is
> interested in.
> 
> For example, to reply to the thread "[Banshee-List] howto avoid creating
> dirs on flash mp3 player", a developer could send a new log4net config
> file to the user to get the right debug information.
> 
> If log4net is defined as a static variable, all plugins can use it by
> adding just one line:
> private static readonly ILog log4net =
> LogManager.GetLogger(typeof(MyClass));
> and the config file will be shared by all plugins.
> 
> What are your thoughts? I can give you some examples of configuration
> files for log4net, or pieces of code that use log4net.
> 
> I think the effort of integrating log4net to banshee is very small. and
> I would be more than happy to contribute.
> 
> 
> Julien Sobrier
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