poll: who really uses mutter?

[Wouter van Heyst]

On Tue, Jul 04, 2006 at 11:21:17AM +1000, Martin Pool wrote:
> In general application debug logs are handy things.  But I'm not finding
> mutter and .bzr.log super useful at the moment, on the crucial test of
> "when something goes wrong, can you work it out just from the logs
> messages already produced".  (One can probably make a theory about the
> intersection of problem space, log setup, and typical bug where they do
> work like that, but let's leave that for now.)
> 
> Getting .bzr.log (other than the traceback) rarely seems to add much to
> bug reports.  (In 0.9 the tracback will just be printed when something
> goes wrong.)  When I do add mutter calls they're typically useful for
> tracking down one particular bug and not much after that, and having
> them in the log is not so useful.  Many of the existing mutter() calls
> produce noise without being very useful, particularly when they're shown
> in test failures.

One of the two reasons I use mutter is when writing tests to ensure my
debug call shows up close to the assert traceback. If I just print
directly the output is located several pages upwards. This might not be
necessary if all the other mutter calls are pruned though.

> I suppose having them go to .bzr.log does have the advantage that it
> doesn't pollute stderr if you're using it for something else.

The other case is where I don't want to pollute stdout, but going to
stderr instead would be fine for me.

> I have a branch where I'm trying to clean up some of the trace code.  I
> propose to 
> 
>  - prune or comment out some of the mutter calls that aren't helping
>    much
>  - not send them to .bzr.log by default?
>  - perhaps add a -D option that writes to stderr - so they're more
>    visible when debugging, and to make a pressure to remove useless
>    traces

Looks good.

How do the two last points combine? Would mutters go nowhere by
default?

Wouter van Heyst