error/info reporting, exception handling, etc.

["Mark M. Ito" <marki@jlab.org>]

Offliners,

While I am in an epistolary mood let me ask about another few software 
items. These are issues that I think have to be addressed on a global, 
cooperative level (and I think they have been raised before). They are 
related:

1. debug level
Shouldn't we have a convention for setting the level of informational 
messages a given package reports and an external way to set it? How 
about debug level 0 (silent), 1 (normal information), 2 (some details 
about execution), 3 (all the details) or some such?

2. message logging
Should we have some sort of custom stream to capture all of the "print 
statements" from the various packages? That would allow a more or less 
standard log file to be created from jobs.

3. exception handling
Shouldn't we define a convention for C++ exception throwing and 
catching, including a standard DException class?

I remember that some work was done on these things. Does anyone remember 
that and if any of that work could serve as a starting point, at least 
for discussion?

  -- Mark