[Spice-devel] SPICE logging facilities

[Christophe Fergeau]

On Tue, Jul 03, 2018 at 05:10:23PM +0200, Christophe de Dinechin wrote:
> There is a lot of debate, distributed across a large number of patches, regarding similar SPICE and glib facilities. For a number of things, there are two sets of parallel APIs with slightly different behaviour. This is undesirable, as it introduces confusion.
> 
> Pros: this lets us customize the behavior for SPICE
> 
> Cons: the SPICE macros are less documented, and not obvious to tell how they differ from the glib counterpart.
> 
> 
> As I wrote in a response to a patch comment, I personally value
> consistency relatively high, so if a file currently uses
> spice_return_if_fail, that’s what I will use in that file. While I may
> agree that using g_return_if_fail in general could be preferable to
> spice_return_if_fail, I would like
> 
> a) to avoid having repeated and unproductive comments about “why not
> use the glib version” for every patch that touches one of these
> macros.
> 
> b) to have a clearer understanding of what the benefits of the SPICE
> and glib variants are (I somewhat understand the difference, my
> question is more about whether there is real value add to the SPICE
> variant or not).
> 
> 
> I had started explaining my preferences here, but I realize it’s
> probably better to gather everyone’s opinion first. Please share your
> preference, e.g. should we switch to glib wholesale, piecemeal, not at
> all, on a per-macro basis, etc, and the rationale behind your
> preference. Meanwhile, I’ll do some additional experiments to solidify
> or change my own preference.

Initially, spice-server/spice-common had no glib dependency, so
spice_warning & friends made sense. Then they started to depend on glib,
so some of the stuff they contained became redundant with what glib
provides. Then spice_log was patched to go through g_log, while
retaining its slight behaviourial differences, mostly for backward
compatibility. At this point, the plan was to slowly get rid of
spice_* and to move to glib logging. Which is why I push for using glib
logging when a patch tries to use the deprecated spice logging API.
If the inconsistency within a file is a problem, then the file can be
switched to the new API first, and the new code can use the glib API and
everything is consistent. Keeping using spice logging API for the sake
of consistency is not going to make the situation better.

Christophe
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