I've been using Log::Log4perl for a few months at work now, and in that time I've noticed that if the configuration file specifies logging to a directory that doesn't exist, Log::Log4perl dies, taking every application using that logging config file with it. The error looks something like: 
Can't open logs/BOGUS/foo.log (No such file or directory) at C:/Perl/s
+ite/lib/Log/Log4perl/Appender/File.pm line 102.
Compilation failed in require at...

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Since one of my main goals in using Log::Log4perl is to centralize my logging configurations, this means that large subsets of my code base can all go down at once from a typo in that config file. This was an acceptable risk when I was the only developer using the package, and I could trust myself to add the directory to the SVN archive in the same commit as I added the config file change (my logging paths are all under my svn root). Now that most of my team is using Log::Log4perl, there is getting to be too much risk of human failure in that approach.

I already have Log::Log4perl thinly wrapped, so I'm going to add some logic to the wrapper to attempt the initilization in an eval and, if it dies, re-attempt to initilize with a known safe (meaning empty) config file. This way, config file issues will only disable logging, not crash applications. I would like a way to automatically create that directory, however. I've thought about hacking the log4perl code to add this functionality, but I'd like to keep that as a last resort. I'm wondering how other monks have solved this problem before me.

Thanks in advance for your replies.

In reply to Graceful handling of Log::Log4perl errors by chaos_cat

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