...This last is a good point.
It is not necessary to dump all of your messages into a single log file.
One very elegant strategy I encountered recently was to maintain a separate
file for messages of each severity level.
Imagine a set of message severity levels:
- chatter
- progress
- information
- warning
- error
If we use "information" as the default logging level, we would
produce three output log files. If the end-user selects a higher
level of logging, then files for that severity level would be
updated too.
In this software, the designers also had log information sent
to STDERR so that you could observe if you felt like it. The syntax
model for the command line was like:
program [-nostderr] [-loglevel <severity>]
As an administrator of that software, I appreciate the ability
to ask for as much (or as little) information as I need. I try to
write my own programs in that same fashion.
...all the world looks like -well- all the world, when
your hammer is perl. ---v |