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

[David Strauss]

In the spirit of "proudly invented elsewhere," Python uses log message
"levels" and filters by minimum severity as the "effective level." The
reason I prefer "verbosity" to "level" is that level discards any
suggestion of the values having an ordering useful for
inequality-based comparison.

On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 1:37 PM, David Strauss <david at davidstrauss.net> wrote:
> 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]



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