Log4Net Fun

Fri, Aug 27, 2004 with tags academic

I’ve decided that finally need a nice logging framework in place for OSSim. Without it, it’s going to be hard to track down what is going on in the application. Being as it’s written in C# I’ve decided to use log4net. Which seems all nice, but there is one major problem, I can’t actually build the software.

You see, in order to build log4net, one needs to use NAnt, which is basically Ant for .Net platforms. Personally, I don’t care much for Ant because it’s not as straight forward as make is. Also, I don’t think it works with my new AutoConf goodness. Anyway, the other big problem with NAnt is that the current stable version doesn’t compile under Mono. Apparently it’s some sort of regression bug that keeps it from happening.

So what’s a guy to do? Well, the last stable release was last December, so I went to download a nightly build. After some frobnicating I was able to get it to work and compile. This was a relief. So I now have a working install of NAnt on my system. But then a new problem showed up.

Apparently massive portions of the NAnt vocabulary have been changed, meaning that the program doesn’t recognize the build files for Log4Net. This was annoying to say the least. Thankfully, they include a binary of Log4Net for Mono along with the distribution of Log4Net. So I can use that, but I’m still not happy becuase I can’t build my own and I can’t hack on it. Because I would really like to implement the ColoredConsoleAppender. Sigh.

Anyway, logging now works, it’s in subversion, which I migrated the repository to yesterday. Still not entirely comfortable with subversion yet, but elte was gonna hook me up with a book on it. Afterall, I can use it for research.