This is difficult to reconcile with libraries only logging on a debug level.
This is difficult to reconcile with libraries only logging on a debug level.
Usually a program is being used by the user to accomplish something, and if logging is meaningful than either in a cli context or a server context. In both cases, errors are more often being seen by people/users than by code. Therefore printing them to logs make sense.
While a lib is being used by a program. So it has a better way to communicate problems with the caller (and exceptions, error values, choose the poison of your language). But I almost never want a library to start logging shit because it’s almost guaranteed to not follow the same conventions as I do in my program elsewhere. Return me the error and let me handle.
It’s analogous to how Go has an implicit rule of that a library should never let a panic occur outside the library. Internally, fine. But at the package boundary, you should catch panics and return them as an error. You don’t know if the caller wants the app to die because it an error in your lib!
It’s very reasonable that a logging framework should allow higher levels to adjust how logging at lower levels is recorded. But saying that libraries should only log debug is not. It’s very legitimate for a library to log “this looks like a problem to me”.
Consider a Smalltalk-like system, or something like TCL, that doesn’t distinguish between programs and libraries regarding invocation mechanism. How would you handle logging in that case?
When you publish a library, people are going to use it more liberally and in a wider range of contexts (which are therefore harder to predict, including whether a given violation requires human intervention)