Re: Java Logging Question

From:

=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Arne_Vajh=F8j?= <arne@vajhoej.dk>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Sat, 01 May 2010 21:29:38 -0400

Message-ID:

<4bdcd573$0$274$14726298@news.sunsite.dk>

On 01-05-2010 20:47, Tom Anderson wrote:

On Thu, 29 Apr 2010, Arne Vajh?j wrote:

On 29-04-2010 18:19, Tom Anderson wrote:

On Wed, 28 Apr 2010, Arne Vajh?j wrote:

On 28-04-2010 19:57, Tom Anderson wrote:

On Wed, 28 Apr 2010, markspace wrote:

Rhino wrote:

The comment above that line says only that the "default file output
in the user's home directory"

User's home directory! Like /usr/rhino or C:\Users\Rhino or
/home/rhino.

Is there anywhere it would be /usr/rhino?

On OS X, it would be /Users/Rhino, FWIW. On unix systems configured
for
large numbers of users, it might well be /home/r/rhino (it's broken up
alphabetically). On unix systems which organise users by primary group
(and there are some), it would be /home/pachyderms/rhino. All of which
is useless information, of which i am a veritable mine.

More importantly, why on earth is java writing logs to home
directories?
That's dreadful behaviour!

If it has to pick a directory that:
- is known to exist
- where the app has write permission
- where files does not get deleted
- conceptually will exist on all platforms (or at least as many as
possible)
then what would you suggest?

I'd suggest those assumptions are wrong. A library has no business
deciding to write logs anywhere on disk at all; it should write logs
where i tell it to, and only when i tell it to. If it has to log and i
haven't told it to write to a file, it should write to syserr.

Isn't that rather pointless when in this Java has been asked
to log to a file?

I am not surprised that logging to a FileHandler actually wants to
write to a file.

That's a highly reasonable assertion!

What is not reasonable is that it's possible to specify a FileHandler
without specifying a file, and thus that a default directory is required.

I would probably also prefer a big fat exception instead of a default
for that.

But somebody at SUN wanted to be helpful.

Arne