[Python-Dev] Planned changes to logging

[Adam Souzis]

(belatedly...) These are good changes, expecially the new basicConfig
constructor, but I'd like point out two issues with the logging
package that i think can easily be addressed:

One is a usability bug: calling fileConfig() disables any logger
objects already created that are not explicitly specified in the log
config file. Since loggers are often created when a module is
imported, it's hard to keep track of the order in which loggers are
created, leading to unexpected behavior because an unspecifed logger
created after the call to fileConfig behave differently -- it will
inherit its settings from its parent logger.
Here's an example illustrating the problem:

import logging, logging.config
import mymodule #this module contains a line like log =
logging.getLogger("mymodule")

if __name__ == '__main__':
  loggging.config.fileConfig("log.config") 
  #mymodule.log is now disabled! 
  #this seems like a bad design -- difficult to figure out what's going on
  #work-around: re-enable the loggers
  for logger in logging.Logger.manager.loggerDict.itervalues():
      logger.disabled = 0        

Second, i'd recommend a minor change that would greatly increase the
flexibility of the architecture: store the entire keyword dictionary
in the LogRecord, not just exc_info -- that way arbitrary objects
could be passed to particular handlers or formatters that know how to
use them.  Some use cases for this:
* pass a unique error number.
* pass structured information about the message, e.g. for writing to a
database table
* for a localized message formatter (LogRecord already stores the
argument list for string interpolation but this is cumbersome for
localization since they depends on the order they appear in the
message).

thanks,
adam

On Sun, 27 Jun 2004 23:52:03 +0100, Vinay Sajip
<vinay_sajip at red-dove.com> wrote:
> I'm planning to check in some changes to the logging package. I'd appreciate
> comments on the following:
> 
> 1. A backwards-compatible change to basicConfig(), making simple
> configuration of logging easier than before. For example, to change the
> level of the root logger to DEBUG:
> 
> logging.basicConfig(level=logging.DEBUG)
> 
> For example, to change the message format:
> 
> logging.basicConfig(format="%(asctime)s %(levelname)-5s %(message)s")
> 
> To log to a file in append mode (for write mode, add a filemode="w"
> argument):
> 
> logging.basicConfig(filename="/logs/myapp.log")
> 
> To log to an existing stream:
> 
> s = open("/logs/myapp.log", "w")
> ...
> logging.basicConfig(stream=s)
> 
> 2. Refactoring of RotatingFileHandler into BaseRotatingHandler and
> RotatingFileHandler. The reason for this is the addition of a new class,
> TimedRotatingFileHandler, which rotates files based on time-dependent
> criteria. (See SF patch #921318 for more details).
> 
> 3. Logger.log() changed to throw a TypeError if raiseExceptions is set and
> the level passed in is not an integer.
> 
> If the changes seem generally acceptable, then I'll also add a section in
> the docs which describes the above basic use cases under a "Basic use of the
> logging package" section which appears earlier in the logging docs than it
> does currently. Except for the documentation changes, I'm planning to commit
> by 3 July.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Vinay
> 
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