logging changes in Dist::Zilla were not complete

In short, there was just too much copy and paste. It wasn’t really trivial, either. Here’s an example of code that appeared in both Pod::Weaver::Role::Plugin and Dist::Zilla::Role::Plugin:

for my $method (qw(log log_debug log_fatal)) {
  Sub::Install::install_sub({
    code => sub {
      my ($self, @rest) = @_;
      my $arg = _HASHLIKE($rest[0]) ? (shift @rest) : {};
      local $arg->{prefix} = '[' . $self->plugin_name . '] '
                           . (defined $arg->{prefix} ? $arg->{prefix} : '');

      $self->weaver->logger->$method($arg, @rest);
    },
    as   => $method,
  });
}

This is gross for a few reasons, but I think that its basic grossness should be obvious. I didn’t want anyone to have to copy this around. The replacement is really nice:

has logger => (
  is   => 'ro',
  lazy => 1,
  handles => [ qw(log log_debug log_fatal) ],
  default => sub {
    $_[0]->weaver->logger->proxy({
      proxy_prefix => '[' . $_[0]->plugin_name . '] ',
    });
  },
);

We say, “I’m a plugin of something with a logger. If I need to log anything, I’ll ask for a proxy to that logger, and my proxy will have a custom prefix.”

This proxy is a Log::Dispatchouli::Proxy, which closely emulates much of Log::Dispatchouli, but with some bits localized and some bits off limits. For example, that proxy_prefix can’t be changed after the fact, but we could turn debugging on or off without affecting the parent logger.

Because I’m using proper delegation again, I can make things lazy again, and I can make it easy to tweak the behavior of one plugin for testing purposes.

This logging work has taken more time than I expected, but I think it will really pay dividends. I hope to get the new logging code documented and all the relevant updates deployed to the CPAN tomorrow. For now, I’m beat and I’m going to bed.

Written on March 12, 2010
🦖 distzilla
🐫 perl
🧑🏽‍💻 programming