On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 4:41 PM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckin...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The solution is obvious - default to writing plain text to log files and
> give the user an option to enable escapes in the log if {s,}he chooses
> to have it. This does mean you can't use tricks with tee.Not sure it is so obvious. Log files are about capturing information. Escapes are about the presentation of information - a reporting feature not unlike pagination/etc. It wouldn't make sense to embed page numbers in a log file - if they are desired they should be added at the time the information is presented, just like escape sequences. It seems to me that the cleaner situation would be to capture information in the logs, and use a pretty-printer of some kind to make it look nice. Terminate output should be made to look nice when directed at a terminal. Of course, the ultimate result of the whole logs-are-information concept is something like the systemd journal, but I won't go there. I'm not sure that would really help here - the challenge is more about the actual content and not the metadata. Rich
