log verbosity levels are stupid

because when should you use any log level other than error, warn, or info?
2023-10-03
- for debug info that doesn’t affect most users, there will always be lower verbosity levels than info, but in my experience these are always extremely specific, and clumping them all into debug or trace doesn’t make much sense
  2023-10-03
  - in that case I believe it is better to declare separate channels that can be filtered individually, and use info for everything
    2023-10-03
    you say info sounds wrong for debug info? well,
    2023-10-03
    guess what, it’s debug info
    2023-10-03
    the very concept of logs is to dump a load of (debug) info for later analysis, so making some distinction between debug and non-debug info while logs are inherently for debugging seems a little silly to me
    2023-10-03
- use severities instead of verbosities
  2023-10-03
  - error is “OH SHIT OH FUCK UHHH”
    2023-10-03
  - warn is “ding ding ding! something ain’t right, but I’ll carry on”
    2023-10-03
  - info is just that - info
    2023-10-03
  - and there is really no need for anything lower, because guess what: debug and trace and Display and Verbose and VeryVerbose and what have you - they’re all just more info for you
    2023-10-03
    and while writing logging code it’s always hard to decide which info should be stuffed into which verbosity, because which info will be interesting to you at the time you read logs depends on what you’re looking for at a given moment
    2023-10-03
this is something I haven’t tried yet, but one day I wanna build a logging framework one day that associates severities with whole categories rather than individual log messages
2023-10-03
- but at that point, do we even need severities at all? would a hierarchy of categories suffice?
  2023-10-03
- I have no clue how well that will work but it would be pretty interesting
  2023-10-03