Log::Any has finally been released to CPAN. It allows CPAN modules to log messages in a generic way, while letting the application choose (or decline to choose) a logging mechanism such as Log::Dispatch or Log::Log4perl.
This is something I’ve been meaning to implement for nearly two years – talk about procrastination! What pushed me over the edge was that three of my distributions – Mason, CHI, and an upcoming Server::Control – all needed to log various things, and had no good generic way to do it.
As part of this effort, I surveyed the various general-purpose logging packages on CPAN to see which ones Log::Any should interface with. Log::Dispatch and Log::Log4perl were the heavyweights and obvious first choices, but I was unprepared for the sheer variety of other distributions. Logging, like templating systems, seems to be one of those things that everyone wants to try their hand at. Here’s a partial list of logging packages that all share roughly the same mission – dispatching logs to various outputs – along with the number of distributions that depend on each:
| Log::Log4perl | 176 |
| Log::Dispatch | 40 |
| Log::Agent | 18 |
| Log::Report | 16 |
| Log::Trace | 13 |
| Log::Dispatch::Config | 9 |
| Log::Message | 5 |
| Log::Channel | 3 |
| Log::Dump | 3 |
| Log::Handler | 2 |
| Log::Info | 2 |
| Log::LogLite | 1 |
| Log::FileSimple | 1 |
| Log::Message::Simple | 1 |
| Log::StdLog | 1 |
| Log::Simple | - |
| Log::Simplest | - |
| Log::Tiny | - |
| Log::Trivial | - |
I particularly like that there are seven packages named with a variation of “Simple”, “Trivial”, etc. Trying to choose between these would be the opposite of simple.
To be fair, Log::Dispatch, presumably the easier of the two main logging packages to configure, requires this just to log normally to a file:
my $dispatcher = Log::Dispatch->new();
$dispatcher->add(
Log::Dispatch::File->new(
name => 'foo',
min_level => 'info',
filename => "$dir/test.log",
mode => 'append',
callbacks => sub { my %params = @_; "$params{message}n" },
)
);
$dispatcher->info('this is a message');
It’s no wonder people tried this and yearned for a simpler alternative. (I’ve gotten permission from Dave to simplify a few of these things with a maintenance release.)
