Yesterday I opened Gerrit change 112699 [0] with a proof of concept implementation for the Structured logging RFC [1] that leverages PSR-3 and Monolog. I'm sure it's not ready to merge yet but hopefully it will get some attention from interested parties to move this discussion forward.
From the commit message: This proof of concept implementation of the structured logging RFC introduces a PSR-3 based logging class. The MWLogger class is actually a thin wrapper around any PSR-3 LoggerInterface implementation. Named MWLogger instances can be obtained from the MWLogger::getInstance() static method. MWLogger expects a class implementing the MWLoggerSpi interface to act as a factory for new MWLogger instances. A concrete MWLoggerSpi implementation using the Monolog library is also provided.
There are a couple things in this change that I expect deserve discussion. The biggest is the way that I am proposing to use Composer to manage importing Monolog and the Psr\Log libraries into mediawiki-core. This crosses into the territory of the Third-party components RFC [2]. This topic has come up on gerrit already. I gave this response there:
Jeroen wrote:
Not really nice to just copy the monolog sources into MW...
I would agree that it's not the cleanest or prettiest way to get significant third-party code incorporated into MediaWiki, but this is part of the conversation that I was hoping this patch could move forward.
Do you have a suggestion for a better way to incorporate external packages that will allow deployment to WMF cluster and easy packaging for the tarball releases? I'm using a Composer file to manage the lib directory so that we can upgrade to newer versions with a minimum amount of fuss. The full "vendor" structure from the Composer is maintained so that license files, etc are preserved. I see this method as being similar to the way that we include jQuery and other javascript libraries.
[0]: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/112699/ [1]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Structured_logging [2]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Third-party_components
On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 11:20 AM, Bryan Davis bd808@wikimedia.org wrote:
Yesterday I opened Gerrit change 112699 [0] with a proof of concept implementation for the Structured logging RFC [1] that leverages PSR-3 and Monolog. I'm sure it's not ready to merge yet but hopefully it will get some attention from interested parties to move this discussion forward.
After a week the criticism of my patch seems to boil down to complaints about usage of Monolog, both packaging and MW facing interface. Does anyone have a constructive suggestion on how to better incorporate a third party library dependency into core?
I really don't want the answer to be "that's too hard, let's roll our own logger". It would be pretty easy to satisfy the current logging needs of the wiki[pm]edia production cluster by going down that route but that doesn't really help others get structured logging without replicating the same infrastructure (and requirements).
I agree that what I'm doing here is not elegant but I think it could be functional in the near term. in the long view the third party library issue needs a better solution.
Bryan
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