[Rock-dev] Updates to Logger

[Jakob Schwendner]

Hi,

I've come across the base/logger again, and noticed a number of problems
with it. 

I would like the base/logging to be a standard for everything logging in
rock. 

Currently I have some confidence issues, that if I use the logger for e.g.
tracing that I will actually get the messages. 
I've created some pull requests to fix some of the problems:
https://github.com/rock-core/base-types/pull/26
https://github.com/rock-core/tools-orocosrb/pull/37
https://github.com/orocos-toolchain/utilrb/pull/15

There are two things left, that I did not want to change without discussion:
(1) Currently CMake define NDEBUG, even on RelWithDebInfo. The base level
for the logger is currently determined by checking for NDEBUG, and switching
to LOG_LEVEL_WARN. This is not what I would expect. My proposal is therefore
to change the base/cmake, to create a new symbol, e.g. -DRelease, which is
then used in the logger to set to WARN for Release packages, and compile in
everything otherwise. I could also set the BASE_LOG_LEVEL directly in the
cmake, but that makes it harder to override. 
(2) A nice option would be for the logger to tell me if the level I am
requesting is not actually compiled in. This however would need for each log
module to do this check once. This is probably a little bit of work to get
right. Any ideas?

On another note: I would argue to not set any packages to stable right now.
I don't see any advantage of leaving out all debug information, other than
maybe size.

Cheers,

Jakob