From: "Amit" <contact.lipik@gmail.com>
* What is your evaluation of the design? I think the library is overdesigned, learning curve is too shallow & very difficult to comprehend for a casual user.
* What is your evaluation of the implementation? Unwieldy & too reliant on preprocessor macros. Namespaces are over-used. Some important considerations have been overlooked
* What is your evaluation of the potential usefulness of the library? I think that with a simplified design, discarding of maybe 25 out of the 30+ namespaces used, automatic defaults for typical tasks, no reliance on macros, this would be a very useful library for almost all C++ developers.
And finally, every review should answer this question:
* Do you think the library should be accepted as a Boost library?
Not in its current form.
Though I've only summarised certain aspects of Amit's review and will not be offering a full review of my own, I wanted to agree wholeheartedly with his critique. Thanks Amit. However, without trying to judge or prejudice the outcome of the review, I hope there is a way forward from here that doesn't outright reject a library that clearly has a huge number of positives. The world of logging is so diverse, its almost impossible to satisfy all aims simultaneously in elegant code. Usability and shallow learning curve, run-time optimisations, flexibility, modularity, extended use cases. If anything, I think the current submission is spreading itself too thin and I for one would love to see a consensus on a core set of capabilities defined with the value of John's experience in knowing how extending the core to a wider set of use cases would affect the core. Is it mainly a case that some syntactic sugar is needed to spruce up the way the logging library works. Its aims and capabilities seem invaluable even if the interface to them isn't quite right yet. Without trying to draw too close a parallel, Boost lost a great asset when Chris Diggins ( http://cdiggins.com/category/cpp/ ) decided 'the boost way' wasn't for him any more and I see the energy, enthusiasm and quality of John's work in a similar vein. I don't know John but I have a great deal of admiration for the can-do spirit. Thanks John for all your efforts. Good luck with the review. Paul Baxter