Design decisions

In the longer term, this page will describe the whole design philosophy behind COASTAL. In the short term, it is used as a kind of notepad to document lower-level decisions

Logging information

At the moment, logging is complicated by the need for various configuration settings. They are needed to control what is displayed and omitted. While the volume of information produced by switching everything on is substantial, even simple tools like grep can help. Logging is not expensive, and logging everything simplifies the code.

Alternatives such as logging levels and logging markers make the code and the logging configuration even more complicated. Therefore, all configuration settings will be removed, and logging is done according to the following principles:

1. The following logging levels are used:
   • INFO for progress messages
   • TRACE for detailed messages logged to a file
   • WARN for non-fatal warnings/errors
   • FATAL for fatal errors

2. Progress messages are displayed on the standard output.

3. All messages are written to a log file.

4. The log file does not show the message; just the module that produced the message. This should suffice to indicate the nature of the message.