Words of wisdom these are, the words of brother dws. I agree wholeheartedly. Especially the remark about logging *all* warning and error messages. In these days of cheap disk space, freely available filtering languages like our beloved Perl, and fast editors with good search commands, selective logging of warnings and errors is almost certainly the wrong choice. Remember, you can always filter downstream, but if valuable information is ignored, you will never get it back.

And always remember you have other options than just log to a file - you can log to a database, too, and get all kinds of nifty features for free - easy reporting, triggers (like, send email if inserted record has priority level > 3 and text like "%boss%"), etc. I have seen whole system management environments being built around this idea, since it is so much more natural for most people to work with data in a database than with data in files (non-Perl people, that is :-) ... ). Heck, imagine the possibilities: you can just store a mapping of problem categories to people, and have your supporters (or even users) just get their daily reports (or triggered emails, or ... ) where they will find their problems to work on - with direct information from your applications.

Christian Lemburg
Brainbench MVP for Perl
http://www.brainbench.com