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> I spent some time looking over the source code and cannot fathom why something that logs information would need to become this complicated. That's easy: beca

by mjr00 5y ago

> I spent some time looking over the source code and cannot fathom why something that logs information would need to become this complicated. That's easy: because software development is complicated. If you look at the ticket where this was added[1], it seems like a reasonable request for something a very featureful logging library might do. Other logging frameworks[2] already supported this feature. It's easy to armchair quarterback and say the feature shouldn't have been added, but the reality is an old project like this that's used by many large enterprises with specific requirements is going to naturally bloat as it ages. Anyone who's been in software dev long enough has experienced this. You build a super-simple internal tool or library that does solves a specific problem you have. It starts getting used. Then you get a feature request from Department A to do something slightly different. Department B says you need to integrate the tool with their new CRM platform. The security team gets involved and says you need to integrate auditing of your tool's usage into their metrics. etc... For Apache/log4j, it's not just multiple departments, but a wide array of companies across the entire world. It's very easy to explain feature bloat. [1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LOG4J2-313 https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LOG4J2-313 [2] http://logback.qos.ch/manual/contextSelector.html http://logback.qos.ch/manual/contextSelector.html

svieira 5y ago
Yet the exact same kind of feature for Logback requires _explicit opt-in_ on the part of the application developer, via a system property (`logback.ContextSelector=JNDI`) that _must be set before Logback is first instantiated_. If you want custom behavior then you, the application developer must write extra configuration or even code in order to wire Logback into your system correctly. Logback doesn't attempt to make this work for everyone for everything. It's a library. Log4J implemented the same thing and tried to make it Just Work for everyone. Unfortunately, that "everyone" includes people who are not even legitimate end-users of the application. Make the hard cases "possible", don't try to make them "easy" (especially not without several solid use-cases around "hard-but-should-be-easy".)
- mjr00 5y ago
  Oh yeah don't get me wrong, the implementation wasn't great. It should have been opt-in at a minimum, and in some kind of separate extension ideally. But there's been so much incredulity in these comment sections about the log4j issue, as if it were totally obvious that the feature was inherently bad and should have never been in an enterprise logging framework, which I don't think is true.

by mjr00 5y ago

svieira 5y ago

Yet the exact same kind of feature for Logback requires _explicit opt-in_ on the part of the application developer, via a system property (`logback.ContextSelector=JNDI`) that _must be set before Logback is first instantiated_. If you want custom behavior then you, the application developer must write extra configuration or even code in order to wire Logback into your system correctly. Logback doesn't attempt to make this work for everyone for everything. It's a library. Log4J implemented the same thing and tried to make it Just Work for everyone. Unfortunately, that "everyone" includes people who are not even legitimate end-users of the application. Make the hard cases "possible", don't try to make them "easy" (especially not without several solid use-cases around "hard-but-should-be-easy".)

mjr00 5y ago
Oh yeah don't get me wrong, the implementation wasn't great. It should have been opt-in at a minimum, and in some kind of separate extension ideally. But there's been so much incredulity in these comment sections about the log4j issue, as if it were totally obvious that the feature was inherently bad and should have never been in an enterprise logging framework, which I don't think is true.