[Spice-devel] [spice-common PATCH v2 00/17] subdomain filtering with glib logging

[Victor Toso]

Hey,

On Tue, Jan 12, 2016 at 05:03:47PM -0600, Jonathon Jongsma wrote:
> So I've gone through the patch series briefly. I am sympathetic to the desire
> for more control over the debugging output, but to be honest I'm not sure
> whether the benefits justify the added complexity. I've used gstreamer a bit
> (which has a similar debugging framework) and I always found the debug framework
> overly complex and I didn't really like using it. For gstreamer it makes sense
> to have a complex debug framework because it produces such a huge amount of
> debug output. You can easily generate debug output that is several gigabytes.
> But for a project like spice, I'm not sure we produce enough output to make it
> necessary.
>
> A couple minor things that I didn't really like much about gstreamer debugging:
> - it's not always obvious what "domains" are available (you have to look in the
> source file to figure out which domain to enable for the thing you want to
> debug)
> - If I haven't done it in a while, I often have to go look up the format for
> specifying the debug specification. Are the domains separated with commas,
> semicolons? do I need to specify numeric values for debug level? or do I use
> strings ("warning", etc)?
>
> So, I'm not totally opposed to this system, but I feel there's something nice
> about keeping it simpler. I'd like to hear opinions from others though.

Sure, if the gains are not good enough to worth the extra complexity, we
can drop this series.

In my opinion, I think debug messages are helpful and can pinpoint a
problem faster so we should use it where it can helps. We definitely
don't output as much as GStreamer but it is really useful track other
users problems with a verbose log.
At the same time, it is very annoying to work on something and have to
parse all the output you don't care at that moment. My grep -v line is
always big.

Basic filtering support is IMHO a nice thing so I thought this could be
useful. I'm all ears to less the complexity and make this more
interesting.

PS:
--spice-debug should be simple enough to have the same behavior that we
have nowadays, meaning DEBUG level to all domains; This series intend to
increase the complexity only if SPICE_DEBUG env is set

Many thanks for your feedback,
  toso