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

[Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek]

On Tue, Feb 05, 2013 at 01:42:57PM -0800, David Strauss wrote:
> 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.
Why? Higher level, lower level, the term "level" is _very_ strongly tied
to (vertical) ordering. Also, height-related methaphors are one of the
most common in all languages, so using "level" makes the metaphor easy.

I prefer 'level' much more, mainly because, like you said, it's the program
that is verbose. And also because it's shorter.

Zbyszek

> 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]
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