[Scummvm-devel] Log file support

[Thierry Crozat]

Hi,

On 24 November 2010 10:10, Max Horn <max at quendi.de> wrote:

> Am 24.11.2010 um 01:41 schrieb Johannes Schickel:
>
> > 1) Log strategy
> >
> > We can basically have two different logging strategies:
> >
> > a) only have one log file, which is overwritten on every run.
> > b) have a fixed maximum of log files and always reuse the oldest one on
> startup (i.e. log rotation).
> > c) have an unlimited number of log files.
>
> I am all for (a) at this point, and will quote myself from a tracker
> comment:
>
> Right now I would prefer to go with the "single log file" approach. A
> single log file is very easy to understand for the user, and there is little
> risk of the user picking "the wrong one". It is also easiest to implement
> for us. E.g. no need to rotate log files to prevent the disk from filling up
> with lots of "-d9" log files.
>
> Potential drawback is that the user must remember to copy it right away,
> before re-starting ScummVM, else it is lost. This is mostly a problem for
> "rare" hard-to-reproduce issues. If the user can easily reproduce it, then
> they are just fine either way. Moreover, if we crash into the debugger
> console, we could display a text there like "If you want to file a bug
> report on this, you can find a log file with relevant info in location XYZ.
> Please copy it NOW, before restarting ScummVM, otherwise it will get
> overwritten." Well, something like that, at least.
>
> It seems given here that one log file corresponds to one run of ScummVM,
yet I have seen no discussion of this. Many applications (on Linux at least,
I am not very familiar with other systems) use a single log file and append
logs to them with a timestamp when restarting the application. This files
can get very big but we could improve a bit the system by overwritting the
file if for example the creation date is not today (i.e. all the runs for a
day are stored in the log file and the files get overwritten the next day).
For the user this would still be simple (only one log file) and remove some
of the problem of overwritting the log file when restarting ScummVM. One
drawback is that this file may still get big (especially when making several
run with -d9, but maybe if the user knows how to start an application with
-d9 he would not mind to much having to manually delete the old log file if
he wants to have a clean log for a new run).

I don't know if this is a good idea, but just wanted to say that there may
be more options than just the three proposed by Johannes.

Thierry
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