[wpkg-users] Logging enhancement request

[Rainer Meier]

Hi Grubi

grubi wrote:
> No sure if it is a good idea to integarte log rotation directly into 
> wpkg. This one could easily be done by regularily scheduling a simple 
> jscript deleting all files older than a specific date. Additionally you 
> could also do things like packing old logs and move them to a different 
> location. This approach reduces complexity of wpkg and still gives you 
> all the flexibility you need.

Exactly my point of view. This discussion was already held on WPKG 
bugzilla - see <http://bugzilla.wpkg.org/show_bug.cgi?id=79#c31> for 
example. It was kind of an off-topic discussion for my 1.0 re-design. 
However my point of view is quite clear. There are as many ways to 
rotate the files as there are ways to imagine rotation (by date, by 
size, by execution...). I think log housekeeping should be up to 
dedicated tools which can handle all this requirements. There is no need 
to incorporate all possible log-rotation techniques to WPKG.


> However what IMHO is still missing is the flexibility to specify that 
> logs are appended and not overwritten. If you look at other apps you 
> will find that appending to logs it the most often default behavour for 
> logging because this ensures that no important information gets lost.

Well that I thought about as well. However if you specify the date (up 
to the second timestamp) in the filename it will never be overwritten. 
Of course that does not completely satisfy the requested ability to 
append logs. At least this makes sure that the logs are not growing 
indefinitely. Furthermore it prevents users to upload huge log-files 
which contains the output of several runs.

I am currently thinking about introducing a new "appendLog" parameter to 
config.xml which is set to "false" by default. What I don't like too 
much about that idea is that appending logs always makes it harder to 
rotate them since their timestamp continously changes. Additionally you 
don't know on server side when the next write access to that file will 
happen. Therefore it might always happen that you rotate/move the log 
while it is in use. So I still prefer that each run writes a completely 
new log file if you want to keep the history. If history is not 
important (I think in most cases you're just interested in the output of 
the last run) you can keep the default which overwrites the same file 
each time.

So please keep patient on this until next release.

br,
Rainer