[mythtv-users] Gentoo 0.28 ebuild

[Gary Buhrmaster]

On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 4:53 PM, Hika van den Hoven <hikavdh at gmail.com> wrote:
...
> I'm getting a bit confused. What then is the function of
> mythlogserver?

As I understand it, there were multiple goals of the mythlogserver.
But the logging targets are not changed whether mythlogserver
is enabled or not.  One of the goals was that by placing the logging
out of the main process that any "last gasp" messages (especially
in the case of crashes) would (in theory) get to the log and not left
in some buffer because the message was (quickly) handed off
to the mythlogserver process.  Another was to potentially decrease
the likelyhood that processing the message could result in delaying
an ongoing thread from proceeding.  In practice (because crashes are
so rare in the current base) the first benefit is almost never seen.
And unless one turns on high levels of debugging there are just not
a lot of messages to deal with in timing critical sections (if you
are a developer turning debugging levels to the max you are
presumed to understand the issues, and are on your own).

So, for the 99%, mythlogserver, whether it is compiled and/or
used or not does not matter for the writing of the log messages
(whether file, syslog, console, ....).  In all cases, logging works
the same (good, bad, and ugly).

Again, the theory of using zeromq to copy messages to the
mythlogserver for later processing/distribution has great appeal.
But the implementation has some edge cases (and more on some
platforms), and it seems to me unlikely to get sufficient investment
in the code to make it back to being enabled by default (and more
likely to eventually have its code removed from the code as it will
be something no longer maintained and tested; typically such
code gets removed when there is a refactoring in the area and
the old code is in the way of the new codes.  I further presume
that the dblog logging code might also be deleted at the same
time if the logging code gets refactored at some future date).