[Python-Dev] Re: PEP 282 comments

[Vinay Sajip]

[Kevin Butler]
> My experience suggests we use Vinay's exception( lvl, msg, *args )
> to automagically call sys.exc_info() at different log levels, but
including
> that change skews the results because of Vinay's shorter comment.  :-)
[some stuff snipped]
> Simple usage & test cases work exactly as they did before,
> plus Jeremy & I are very happy with our "advanced" applications,
> and the "simple subclass" now just needs to override _log to do
> advanced things with other optional arguments.

To me, this point gives the kwargs argument an edge over the exception(lvl,
...) approach.

> If you can provide a simple standard that supports both simple
> and advanced applications with equal facility, and you can save
> code by doing it without sacrificing readability, why in the world would
> you want to require multiple users to add subclasses that just duplicate
> the standard library methods with such a slight change?
[Kevin Butler, in a followup mail]
> By adding the **kwargs to the convenience methods,
> the Logger opens itself to change and enables all subclasses
> to extend the interface by overriding _log with more keyword
> arguments.

Kevin, I think you make some good points. If we use **kwargs, we can lose
exception and logException, making the interface simpler. And as for the
semantics of "exc_info" - it needn't actually be a sys.exc_info() return
value - just a truth value to indicate that the caller wants traceback
information in the log. In fact, it might be better to code it this way, so
that extensibility is a little less restricted.

If I re-implement with **kwargs, and remove exception and logException, does
anyone have objections if I release 0.4.1 with these (and other) changes?

Regards

Vinay