[boost] Re: Re: [ann] log viewer

From: Vladimir Prus (ghost_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-04-28 10:13:18

John Torjo wrote:

>>I wonder if you've seen Chainsaw
>>
>>    http://logging.apache.org/log4j/docs/chainsaw.html
>>
>>and plan to compete with it or fix some weaknesses of it, or something
>>else?
>>
>>  
>>
> I wasn't aware of it. Anyway, I've downloaded and tested it.
> (installing was quite hard, it took me a while)

Heh, I could not make it run yet ;-)

> Anyway, this is very log4j specific. I see that it has some receivers,
> but I'm not sure how they work.
> The only one I tested was LogFilePatternReceiver but it seems static. If
> I append to a certain file, I need to do a manual refresh of all
> receivers, which is pretty annoying. Also, noticed a lot of bugs and
> expressions did not work. As far as I saw, it can only show up to
> 7000-8000 messages at a time, which is pretty small for me.

I can only trust you on those points. 

> The program I developed IMO is
> - very user-friendly, easy to use
> - handles files any size (in the future I'll work on adding aggressive
> caching to support ~1Gb logs)
> - very fast
> - expressions work ;)
> - works with any log files. Just drag-and-drop them into the program

What I always wanted is some kind of 'debug dumps'. E.g. the program I work
on now sometimes prints graphs into stdout in some textual representation.
To view them, I need to copy paste from the log, and run two external
programs. If would be nice of log viewer could quickly locate such 'dumps'
and show them using customizable command sequence, or maybe C++ code.

If we return to libraries side, it's highly desirable for logging library to
support data dumps. The primary difference with logging is that for each
dumped object, you need to presicely identify the name of object being
logged.

IOW, for two code lines:

    log("lvk.flow") << "Entering some function";
    dump("lvk.flow.paths.input") << graph;

The first output can be formatted in any possible way, but the second should
include "lvk.flow.paths.input" somewhere, so that it's possible to
automatically extract it from the log.

- Volodya