Please remove the hard dependency on glog

[mvdan]

The parser imports https://github.com/golang/glog directly, for calls such as:

https://github.com/protocolbuffers/txtpbfmt/blob/fc78c767cd6a4e6e3953f5d72f1e0e4c5811990b/parser/parser.go#L392 https://github.com/protocolbuffers/txtpbfmt/blob/fc78c767cd6a4e6e3953f5d72f1e0e4c5811990b/parser/parser.go#L989

It's understandable to want to have some verbose logging, but I think it's a bad idea for a "pure" Go library such as a parser to make direct calls to a logging library:

• It forces all importers to also include glog as part of their build and binary, even if they don't want nor need any logging.
• Logging shouldn't be enabled by default in generic libraries. The caller or main program should be in charge of logging, just like any input/output with the user.
• Hard-coding a logging library makes it very hard or near impossible to use a single log implementation across an entire program using multiple library packages.

I think the best and simplest API fix would be to declare a logging interface and use it, such as:

type Logger interface {
    Infof(format string, args ...interface{}) // used for verbose logs
    Errorf(format string, args ...interface{})
}

One could also argue that error logs should be returned as error values instead, but I'm not very familiar with how the glog API is designed in detail.

I'm filing this because I'm the maintainer of a relatively large open source program where we use and ipmort txtpbfmt, but we pull glog indirectly too, which unfortunately affects us in multiple ways (e.g. https://github.com/cue-lang/cue/issues/1199, but also binary size etc).

[stapelberg]

Hey Daniel! 👋

Agreed on all points. For historical context: we needed to get a number of ducks in a row for the initial open-sourcing of txtpbfmt, and doing something better than just swapping our internal log package for glog wasn’t in the cards back then.

Would you be willing to send a pull request which implements the interface you suggested? cc me on it, and we can get this improved.

Thanks

[mvdan]

Oh, I wasn't aware you were involved :) I can certainly send a quick PR.

[Nexucis]

Hi,

I was wondering if there is an on going fix. As a cue user, I was quite annoyed to see the glog flags poping in my binary. If there is none, perhaps I could give a try.

[stapelberg]

Sending the PR is the fix. AFAICT, there was no PR yet

[mvdan]

Thanks for the pings - I completely forgot about this. I can send the PR today.

[Nexucis]

ooh I was going to do it as well haha. Well thank you for doing it @mvdan !