[slf4j-dev] Category of Logger vs. name of containing class.

[Endre Stølsvik]

Hi!

Reading the emails about markers, levels and categorization, I was 
wondering: is there a good reason for sticking with using the class name 
as the category name, other than convenience?

The reason for asking, is that I feel that several of the suggestions 
seems to be kinda assume that the category of the logger is already "used 
up" for the name of the class, so that it cannot be used for other 
categorization outside of the existing categorization already made by the 
java package-and-classname hierarchy.
   You can already get the actual classname (and method) of a log statement 
by using the introspection (formatting) methods, at least in log4j and 
java.util.logging. Thus using the category of the Logger for this seems to 
me as waste of identification-space - a whole axis: It is redundant 
information.
   Obviously, one wouldn't want the class-extraction features to be used in 
a production environemnt, due to the (rather heavy) overhead of extracting 
it. However, log configs can be changed easily, and if you make provisions 
for it, even runtime. Thus if you can't track back a log-line to the point 
where it was made (the class), then you can turn on these features in your 
log-config, and thus extract them. However, it is seldom that I have had 
to turn to such measures, at least when working with my own codebase.

Endre.