I agree wholeheartedly with this. I want to add that when you can't get logging working it complicates other troubleshooting because when something is not worki

I agree wholeheartedly with this. I want to add that when you can't get logging working it complicates other troubleshooting because when something is not working the first thing you should do is "look in the logs". I wish there was some way to bring up logging in a kind of safe mode so that it wouldn't do all the fancy things but at least you could get either console or simple log files. More than once I have had to look at some java code running is a context or environment that I was not familiar with and had so much trouble getting logging working that I wrote my own quick and dirty logger to debug the original issue. I never tried to turn these throw away logging implementations into a stand alone project or anything. It took about 20 lines of code to get a simple one working. That is deterministic, I can write that kind of code in no time. Getting the real logging working seems non-deterministic sometimes. Too many times I have had to go to google and end up learning something about logging. Learning something that I will never use again.