In order to make the Logging lib as usable as it can be, I'd like to know what is *your* scenario, when using a Logging lib.
I hope I'm allowed more than one... Actually all the use cases I can think of are variations of one of the following two scenarios. If you can make a logging library that can handle both scenarios *and* is still easy to learn and use, I'm going to be impressed :-). SCENARIO A: socket server I define ERROR, WARN and INFO and all go in the same big log file. Timestamp automatically prefixed. Three tab-separated fields (i.e. timestamp, level, message). It is always there in production code. How it needs to be improved: 1. Be able to hide info, or info and warn lines when viewing the log file. Alternatively write each level to its own log file, and have a viewer that is able to combine the three files (I.e. typical usage is I want to see what INFO/WARN messages led to an ERROR message). Any viewer must work on Windows and linux. 2. Daily log rotation, with YYYYMMDD style datestamp going into the filename. If hourly log rotation then YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS style datestamp in the filename. (I also want logs older than N days to be gzipped, and log older than a certain date to be deleted; but I'm happy - in fact happier - for these tasks to be done by cron job not a logging library, as it is a system administrators decision not a programmers decision) 3. Be able to start/stop a DEBUG level while the program is running. 4. Email me when an ERROR message occurs. Different levels of error could go to different email addresses (i.e. more serious ones need to go to a mobile email address). SCENARIO B: debugging game tree search Currently I use a simple LOG macro that writes to a log file. I then use SMART_ASSERT() to stop when a problem is hit. What I need to be able to see is when something asserts where it has been recently. In certain cases this has generated 2+GB of log file before hitting the assert, and taken over an hour. I log board positions, i.e. two-dimensions. Or in other words my log messages have carriage-returns in and I want formatting preserved. I want certain information always written to the log: search depth, total nodes so far, filename, line in the file, current function, etc. But I'm fine that I have to write a custom macro that passes this data on to the logging library macro. I don't need or want timestamps in the log. I don't need any threading support. The LOG macro must be able to be compiled out completely. This is code that once debugged and compiled in release mode should take a fraction of a second to run. What I want that I don't have: Instead of writing to a log file, I want to write to a memory buffer, that only stores the last 2MB, or the last 100 messages, for instance. Then when I have an assert I want to be able to output the contents of that buffer. E.g. SMART_ASSERT(node_cnt<5000 && depth<50)(depth)(node_cnt)(current_position)(history_log.output()).msg("What can it be thinking to search so deeply?"); In-memory is important as writing to a disk file is a major performance bottleneck. Darren