Stop dividing history into conversations?

[Etan Reisner]

On Wed, Feb 13, 2008 at 02:33:41PM -0800, Mr. Brad wrote:
> I know; I don't work on this project, but I am a professional programmer
> working on very large projects (Guitar Hero), and I have to disagree
> that splitting a log file serves any useful purpose.
>
> To me, the log file should store important events: messages, timestamps,
> and possibly status changes.  Splitting a log file based on a window
> event seems arbitrary.  If someone wants to view their logs that way,
> the window events should be stored in the log file, and it should be an
> option in the log file viewer to display it in conversations.
>
> My log folders are rapidly filling with hundreds of separate files.  Why
> doesn't each contact have one log file, with an option to view them
> however the user wants?  Splitting them forces the user to adhere to
> your standard (each new window is a separate conversation), whereas
> storing one log file doesn't prevent you from viewing it as
> conversations - the viewer would just need to split it up at display time.

As Ethan commented this forcing of a convention is about the only truly
valid point you make and is even then only valid in so far as avoiding it
requires trivial postprocessing to concatenate together. (Whereas, as
Ethan also pointed out parsing is significantly more work and
significantly costlier.)

As a further comment, the speed required to view and generally manipulate,
a single file is dependent on the size of that file and not generally on
the number of files in the same directory. Therefore our current scheme
allows for much quicker access to any individual file than would a single
large log file which is a feature I appreciate greatly as I much more
often need to find a specific bit of a log file then I need to read the
entirety of multiple log files (which action is still likely faster with
the current method).

> brad

One last point unrelated to the issue at hand but rather to the content
and tone of your email. I would like to publically acknoweledge that the
tone and demeanor you use in your email, as well as your usage of proper
English and punctuation, made your correspondance a pleasure to read and
respond to. This list (and myself in particular) have garnered a (largely)
undeserved reputation of being overly hostile to people with suggestions
and comments and I would just like to state that if all the suggestions
and comments we received were presented in as pleasant a manner as this I
personally would never see the need to do anything even remotely
resembling hostility.

    -Etan