Confusing millisecond diffs

[emschwartz]

The debug modules includes millisecond diffs for each namespace. This module adds to each namespace such that debug('thingX:debug') and debug('thingX:error') will have unrelated diffs.

[emschwartz]

To me, this suggests that adding stuff to the namespace isn't really the right way to use the debug module

[sharafian]

The main reason that we went for this approach is that lots of modules are too noisy, with no way to distinguish between different levels. When all the trace level stuff is marked, though, you can exclude everything ending in :trace.

Maybe a solution could be changing the output format of debug like what riverpig does, to add timestamps. The millisecond diffs are kinda unhelpful anyways

[emschwartz]

See debug-js/debug#582 re: adding proper timestamps

[emschwartz]

I think the purpose of the debug module is to be a super simple debugging tool, rather than a full-on logger. If the log output is being used in production and different logging levels are needed, why not switch to or add a proper logger? This module seems like a strange in-between

[sharafian]

If we used a regular logger, then logs on the info/error/warn levels would go to stdout/stderr even when the DEBUG flag isn't set. I agree that this module is in a kinda weird middle ground between debug and a normal logger, but if we went fully one way or another then our libraries would either be too noisy (with one debug level to toggle all messages) or would be annoying to use (if you import it as a library and it starts logging straight to stdout)