Re: [boost] Boost.Log formal review upcoming

Subject: Re: [boost] Boost.Log formal review upcoming
From: Matthias Vallentin (vallentin_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-03-02 12:08:51

On Mon, Mar 01, 2010 at 02:44:32PM -0500, Daniel Larimer wrote:
> If my "requirements" fall outside the scope of 'logging' then perhaps
> we should define what logging means.

Your description of logging is similar to the notion in the database
community, e.g., using WAL to store records on disk in order to reread
at a later point of time in case the main data structures are
inconsistent due to a crash or bug. In this scenario, I agree that a
logging library should offer a vehicle to efficiently transport the data
to a backend. The duality of writing the data out and reading it back in
seems orthogonal to me and can be handled via boost::serialization, as
you suggest. What remains is the dispatching logic that brings the
"blob" archive contents back from the sink to the point where they
should be deserialized, that is, the source. I believe that is currently
not possible with the library because there is no notion of records in
the backends. 

At the other end of the spectrum, logging is used synonymously for
documenting program activity, often in a textual human-readable fashion.
In this case, there is no need to replay the contents as they are only
summaries or documentation of activity rather actual data. 

The library in its current form is well-suited to perform the latter
task but probably needs to be extended to support the former.

   Matthias
-- 
Matthias Vallentin
vallentin_at_[hidden]
http://www.icir.org/matthias