From: Brian Marick <marick@...>
Date: 2002-01-17T07:36:11+09:00
Subject: Re: Announcing Log4r - A flexible logger for Ruby

At 06:41 PM 1/14/02, you wrote:
>On Tue, 15 Jan 2002, Brian Marick wrote:
>
> > 2) It might be good to predefine a Formatter that prints the
> >      location a log message came from. Like this:
> >
> >        netapp.rb:13:in `initialize'
>
>Do you mean the execution trace? That's generated when requested :)

Whenever the code logs a message, I'd like to see what line of code it came 
from. So when I find a log message like "Move successful!" I can go to the 
code and see what on earth that means. (Because I print locations in normal 
Ruby form and use Emacs, I can go to the source with a single command, ^h^h 
in my case.)

The format I showed is kind of verbose. Here's another example. I use my 
tracing system to put "todo" messages in the code or the tests. These are 
like the comments you sometimes see:

   # XXX - clean this up someday.
   def a_method...

except they're executable:

   todo 'clean this up someday'
   def a_method...

Normally, they're not displayed, but I can turn them on to see something 
like this:

TODO: Do I care to test whether the parser works if the link comes before 
the title? (./util.rb:71)
TODO: If there are no changes, don't send mail? Don't update what was sent 
last? (All.rb:8)
TODO: Do wikis ever order the changes increasing instead of decreasing? 
(All.rb:9)

(Note: the version of Ruby-Trace on my web site doesn't have the newest 
todo code.)


--
Brian Marick, marick@testing.com
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