[rfc][icedtea-web] refactored logging

[Pavel Tisnovsky]

----- Omair Majid <omajid at redhat.com> wrote:
> On 09/11/2013 12:29 PM, Pavel Tisnovsky wrote:
> >> Can you describe the motivation for logging into syslog? Is this
> >> somethings lots of other user programs do?
> > 
> > The main problem with the current solution is that most users don't know
> > how to enable debug output
> 
> The single place to configure (enable) logging for both javaws and
> plugin is itweb-settings, no? Should we be fixing that to make things
> more obvious?
> 
> > and also how to run ITW (+browser) from the console
> > to see error output. Syslog might be better and I think it's now the standard
> > way how applications might log its messages.
> 
> I don't know if I have seen anything other than system applications (or
> non-interactive) applications use syslog. What other applications that
> you can interact with on the command line do this?
> 
> At least as far as programs are concerned, my first instinct is to look
> at --help (or -help or -h) for some sort of --verbose or -v or --debug
> flag and use that. Maybe I have been doing it wrong, but I can't
> remember looking at the syslog for any interactive programs, ever.
> 

Yes, I see your point and I think it's valid for *most time*.

But I have an example where the standard logging (and -v, --verbose...) is not sufficient:

- there was a problem (well not just one :) with Elluminate & ITW cache. ITW fail
to start Elluminate for the first time (firefox was started from GUI, ie. w/o console
as is usual), but other starts were affected by the first
attempt to start Elluminate (IIRC cache contained wrong items). At this moment it
was almost impossible for given user to clean everything to be able to repeat
the issue (with logging enabled this time!). With syslog it would be quite easy
to simply investigate what *was* wrong on the first attempt.

-> standard logging to stderr is perfect when things could be preciselly repeated

> For the browser plugin, I guess syslog makes a little bit more sense for
> standard logging messages. I am not sure the actual debug messages from
> the plugin (as in ~/.icedtea/logs/) are appropriate - maybe it will be
> too much noise?

I'm +1 to log failures only (incl. full ST if possible).

> 
> Thanks,
> Omair
> -- 
> PGP Key: 66484681 (http://pgp.mit.edu/)
> Fingerprint = F072 555B 0A17 3957 4E95  0056 F286 F14F 6648 4681