poll: who really uses mutter?

[Michael Ellerman]

On 7/4/06, Martin Pool <mbp at canonical.com> 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.

It's good to have, but I agree it's generally not useful until you add
some mutter calls in the area where you think the bug is.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's not possible to add enough
debug output to help solve some large percentage of bugs, without
affecting performance and cluttering the code to the point where it's
unbearable. So we should just live with that fact :)

cheers