666376 - NSPR logging should allow to append log info to the log file

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(NSPR :: NSPR, enhancement, P1)

Description

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

As discussed on bug 666022 comment 22 it would be helpful to have the capability of NSPR to append log data and not recreate the log file each time Firefox starts.

As Jason mentioned there is a patch available which was used to track another fix. So it should be minimal work to get in this enhancement.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=splinter.html&bug=534764&attachment=485332

Comment 1

[Jason Duell]

Attachment: Adds "append" module name to allow appending to existing NSPR log file

Here's a modified version of Srirang's patch (attachment 485332 [details] [diff] [review] from bug 534764).  I've changed the module name from "notrunc" to "append", because I think that's more intuitive, and made a few whitespace formatting changes.

Comment 2

[Jason Duell]

Attachment: v2: Adds "append" module to allow appending to existing NSPR log file

oops--got the boolean values reversed.  Silly me for not testing before I uploaded the patch.

Comment 3

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Can we get any progress on this bug? It's something I really would like to see so we could debug our software update failures on the day of a Firefox release.

Comment 4

[Jason Duell]

WTC,

FYI you already reviewed the basic logic for this patch in bug 534764, so I doubt it'll take more than a glance-over to +r this.

Comment 5

[Wan-Teh Chang]

jduell: I will try to review this patch this weekend or
next week.

Comment 6

[Wan-Teh Chang]

Attachment: v3: Adds "append" module to allow appending to existing NSPR log file

I changed the |mode| argument for fopen() from "a+"
to "a" because the '+' sign means "update" (reading
and writing).

jduell, please test this change on Windows.

Patch checked in on the NSPR trunk (NSPR 4.9).

Checking in prlog.c;
/cvsroot/mozilla/nsprpub/pr/src/io/prlog.c,v  <--  prlog.c
new revision: 3.54; previous revision: 3.53
done

Comment 7

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

When will this feature be available in Nightly builds of Firefox? Immediately or does it need a pull first? Also we should update the documentation on MDC.

Comment 8

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

Milestone is listed as "4.9" which leaves me really confused about how that correlates to Firefox. :)

Comment 9

[Jason Duell]

The code is in m-c now, so this is in the nightly builds, and targeted for firefox 9.

I've verified that it works on windows and Linux.

Comment 10

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Works also fine on OS X with Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:9.0a1) Gecko/20110919 Firefox/9.0a1. Thanks a lot!

Comment 11

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

Turns out the logging features in NSPR aren't yet documented at all, so this is going to serve as a placeholder bug for "document NSPR logging." Don't suppose anyone wants to do that?

Comment 12

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

This change is mentioned on Firefox 9 for developers; actual documentation needs to be written and is covered in bug 712002.

Comment 13

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Eric, not sure where this feature has been documented, but we can't find it on MDN. Can you please re-check for the ',append' flag?

Comment 14

[Jason Duell]

It's not even documented in the prlog.h file. (nor is ",timestamp" FWIW).  But the code is there.