Hi Eric,
I'm taking some time to respond to your issues:
Eric Kohl wrote:
My vote is NO!
I'd like to keep the current debugging message system for the
following reasons:
1) Establishing a channel-based debug message system will flood the
developers with messages they don't need.
I don't understand? On the contrary, it allows you to choose what you
want to see or not. Right now DPRINT1 enables messages for everyone who
is using ROS. With runtime selection, you choose what you need or not.
Can you please clarify on what you meant?
2) I cannot enable a message in a single place without hacks, like
turning a TRACE into a FIXME. Alternative: introduce TRACE1, FIXME1,
etc. which are always enabled. But this looks like the current system.
Sure you can, the NT Debug APIs allow you to send a universal, non
disablable debug message (or a raw DbgPrint). This is not an issue.
And if you're worrying about having to take the time to replace a
"FIXME" into a "TRACE" (lazy! :P), well, nothing says we can't
use
DPRINT1, 2, 3, 4. DPRINT could be "Level 1 - Always Print", "Level 2 -
Print if minimal debugging is enabled", "Level 3 - Print if general
tracing level is enabled", "Level 4 - Print if super verbose tracing
level is enabled".
3) I don't like to make changes to the registry in order to change the
debug channel settings. How will I debug the boot process from a CD or
floppy disk?
Now this is a good argument that you bring up...but it seems moot after
some analysis. How can you use your computer at all if you can't make
registry changes? I think we currently use a ram disk for the registry,
so there's no problem in setting the channels just like you'd set any
other registry setting.
Regards,
Eric
Best regards,
Alex Ionescu