[tahoe-dev] collective effort to improve logging

[zooko]

Folks:

I just committed a patch that Arno contributed back in August.   
(Sorry about the delay.)

http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/changeset/1192

The goal is to make log messages clear to readers of logs while also  
being easy for programmers to insert calls to log().

So if anyone sees things that could be improved in logging, please  
speak up.

I myself am interested in switching to ISO-8601'ish, UTC timestamps,  
as I've done in the past:

http://allmydata.org/darcs.cgi/pyutil/pyutil/pyutil/time_format.py? 
c=annotate

Currently our logs lines look like this:

070911-14:02:47 [Uninitialized] Stopping factory  
<foolscap.negotiate.TubConnectorClientFactory object [from z23k6ynh]  
[to qtjkk6cy] at 0x208e6b0>
070911-14:02:48 [Client] z23k6ynh: 'connected to qtjkk6cy'

With ISO-8601'ish, UTC timestamps, they would look like this:

2007-09-11_20:02:47 [Uninitialized] Stopping factory  
<foolscap.negotiate.TubConnectorClientFactory object [from z23k6ynh]  
[to qtjkk6cy] at 0x208e6b0>
2007-09-11_20:02:48 [Client] z23k6ynh: 'connected to qtjkk6cy'

Here's the classic advocacy page for ISO-8601 from Markus Kuhn:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html

If people strongly prefer other (more compressed) timestamp formats  
then I'll agree to use those instead of my preferred ISO-8601'ish.

I would prefer it if we would all use UTC timestamps, because I often  
compare events from Tahoe logs from different timezones, and I rarely  
compare events from a Tahoe node log with other events made by  
different software in the same timezone.  If other people feel  
differently, I don't mind, but if we're going to use non-UTC  
timezones in logs then I want to include the timezone indicator in  
the timestamp, like this:

070911-14:02:47-06 [Uninitialized] Stopping factory  
<foolscap.negotiate.TubConnectorClientFactory object [from z23k6ynh]  
[to qtjkk6cy] at 0x208e6b0>
070911-14:02:48-06 [Client] z23k6ynh: 'connected to qtjkk6cy'

(See Markus Kuhn's page about timezone notation.)

Thanks!

Regards,

Zooko