Logging is the worst kind of Python standard-library module: too clunky and ugly to be pleasant, but not bad enough to justify the breakage of using a third-party alternative. In comparison, urllib and urllib2 are great, because they suck so much that everybody just uses requests instead.
I totally agree with you. In fact, that's why I wrote an alternative logging library — to try to do the same thing for `logging` that `requests` did for `urllib`. Feel free to check it out: https://github.com/peterldowns/lggr
EDIT: Forgot to mention that although I haven't worked on this for a couple of months, I'm about to revisit it and would love to have other contributors. Please, fork this and make it better!
Slightly pedantic, but you're correct. I meant that he's right that the standard logging library sucks. I guess I think it sucks more than he does, though, becuase I did write my own library.
What's so clunky? It scales nicely. Simplest thing just works, when you need more, you can learn just enough to get what you want.
import logging as log
log.warning("groupthink says it sucks")
log.error("omg wtf, so hard!!!")
log.basicConfig(filename='ignorance.log',level=log.DEBUG)
log.debug("rtfm", exc_info=True)
And so on; formatting, handlers, multiple loggers, config files, proper lib logging, etc. All very pluggable and extendable, but only if you need it.
That's a shot at the many people posting here and elsewhere about how "horrible" logging module is. Most of whom I suspect (cause it ain't that bad) are jumping on the hatewagon without actual investigation of the module.
</rant>