I must confess I cannot follow you completely. What we were/are talking about is that the assumption a logging entry needs timestamp, log level and such is not appropriate. If you have legacy syslog style logging in mind it appears natural but for a lot of use cases it is not. Even if you could say that a timestamp is part of the logging domain it is not said if that timestamp needs to be part of the log object or the logger consuming this object. This question arises for every quality of a logging object. Even the logging level could be some behavioral quality that a logger matches to log levels. Contrary to this is logging thisContext which has to be done in the log object.

I think the hard part is the way of distribution of log objects and filtering of them. While the former is being discussed with Beacon the latter is mostly ignored while being really important. Not having default qualities of a log object is good on one hand but on the other hand the filtering is much harder.��

In SystemLogger we didn't go far enough at first. The Log class contained level and such. That was the reason for me to split it into BasicLog consisting of timestamp and a message object and Log which contains the extra qualities. Nowadays I think you should be able to use any object as log object. The provided classes are just helpers. A composed object that has timestamp, level and a message object is a good utility but not a requirement. We need to support all of these. And so I would object against putting a lot of protocol in the Object class. In SystemLogger you have

Object>>#asLog

^ self class newLog message: self

Object class>>#newLog

^ self logClass new

Object class>>#logClass

"Hook supporting the redefinition by object of their associated log.

When using myObject asLog emit, the logClass will be used and myObject will be passed as message argument."

^ Log

So assuming the Log class would not contain log levels but SysLog would do you could easily override #logClass in your domain object and use it this way

MyDomainClass class>>#logClass

^ SysLog

myDomainObject asLog

warning;

emit

This way we do not need to pollute Object with a lot of methods that are tight to one use case. The call to #warning could be something else that only depends on the Log class you want to use.��

So to me the discussion about Log classes is not very helpful. We can have dedicated log classes like the stack capturing one but also one that is composed of the message object and certain qualities. If you would have a WrappedSyslogSignal you can have a log object that is composed and syslog aware by providing log levels. Again I think the hard part is to have flexible logging and still be able to filter it. I would like to be able to attach a handful of loggers and be sure the loggers get the right set of log objects they are interested in.