Re: Giant logfile

["Joe Shaw" <joe joeshaw org>]

Hi,

On 10/13/07, Debajyoti Bera <dbera web gmail com> wrote:
> I was referring to this part:
> // FIXME: We always turn on full debugging output!  We are
> //still debugging this code, after all...
> //arg_debug ? LogLevel.Debug : LogLevel.Warn,
> LogLevel.Debug,
> ...
>
> which basically ignores the --debug. I think it is high time we respect the
> users decision by default.
>
> Did you mean all distributions (I know about OpenSUSE and Fedora, maybe Ubuntu
> also does) know about this and patch the code with a higher loglevel ?

Yes, I know that openSUSE, Fedora, and Ubuntu all do this.

Packages from the openSUSE Build Service (which I also maintain w/ the
stock openSUSE Beagle package) don't have this patch, though, and that
is intentional.  A lot of the people who are running the build service
package were asked to upgrade to it from whatever shipped with 10.2 to
ensure that bugs were fixed.  This was the easiest way to do that.

> I don't think all distributions know about this; even if they do, what purpose
> does it serve us. Only users who install from source will ever see large
> logfiles and thereby figure out there is some problem.

There's a tradeoff here, to be sure, and my assumption was that users
who build from source are more likely to be savvy and more able and
willing to help us with debugging if they ran into a problem.  It's no
small task to build from source and the majority of people won't do
it.

> What I was suggesting was a way around this: respect the --debug flag and
> allow turning on the debug during runtime (so that if a user is suspicious of
> something, debug can be turned on and log file inspected). That way
> distributions wont have to patch it and we can still ask users for debugging
> information even if they do.

Sure, and we have this today with most of the Beagle instances out
there, since most users just use packages.  They can run with --debug,
which turns up the debug level, and they can send the process SIGUSR1
to raise debugging to the equivalent to --debug at runtime.

Joe