[systemd-devel] Shedding some legacy naming: syslog "priority"

[David Strauss]

On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 1:09 PM, Lennart Poettering
<lennart at poettering.net> wrote:
> If we choose the latter, would "verbosity" really be the best choice? I
> am not a native english speaker, but to me this sounds much broader than
> "priority" or "level" do?

I suggested it for two reasons:

 * There's a long history of command-line -v switches to increase
verbosity, often to the point where having enough (-vvvvvv) logs or
outputs at the debug level. So, it's a familiar term in the Unix
world.
 * It makes semantic sense with the integer values. The value of
LOG_DEBUG is greater than LOG_WARNING, and the "verbosity" of an
application displaying LOG_DEBUG (and more important) is higher than
one displaying LOG_WARNING (and more important).

The only thing I don't like about calling the argument "verbosity" is
that, English-wise, the *program* is verbose, not the log messages
themselves. But, I can't think of anything better.

> Maybe call it "7-minus-priority" or so? ;-)

It's certainly better than the normal antonyms of "priority," like
"unimportance" or "irrelevance."

--
David Strauss
   | david at davidstrauss.net
   | +1 512 577 5827 [mobile]