I’ve been working on creating a simple IRC bot, which I want to give simple logging capabilities. This is logging in the sense of logging conversations, which channels/servers they take place in, etc. I have less need for a logger in the sense of error/debug logging. Unfortunately, this latter sense is what most results are for any search regarding logging. One of the things making this difficult is that I have no idea what to call the kind of logging I’m referring to in order to distinguish it from the usual sense.
Which makes me wonder: Is there a difference? Should I just use a normal logging facility for this, or is there a specific kind of logging facility which I should use for this, and if so, which ones are good?
I think this is called data logging, and an archetypal example would be the access logs generated by the Apache Web server.
I don’t think that you should use logging frameworks, because severity levels are irrelevant to you, and you don’t need the complexity of their formatters, appenders etc.
It’s probably just a question of rolling your own, since your problem is little more than writing to files.
Are there any specific difficulties you anticipate that you would like a library to solve for you?