Stef,
I'm really sorry if my question and the answers, opinions and expectations of this thread made you feel bad.
Do not worry. this is not this thread in particular. It is just an instance of larger process. People in general have strange expectation about Pharo. A basic google project has a around 20 to 25 full time paid engineers Pharo far far less. Now we can be powerful if people understand that they can help
It was a not a strange expectation or a general discussion on logging at all, but a true question about existing logging facility in Pharo that I do not know, and the fact is there was Beacon, SystemLogger and ZnLogger, and albeit it may look depressing to you, this thread has some very interesting pointers to me. I think everybody's answer has some valid arguments from it's own point of view, none of them is really controversial, and the merging you talked about should settle everyone's expectations right.
For me, I was looking for a logging tool for a project I (re)started some time ago and broke recently, trying to refactor it. More precisely I don't know why a client socket connection is closing, here I think Beacon will really help me on that, ZnLogger or SystemLogger could too. And even if the sl4s package looks good, it would help less for debugging (I 'm not saying it is not good), inspecting logged objects will be really a big plus.
I would be very interested in following, participating or helping (docs, or whatever useful, eventually code or tests with my very limited skills and with some guidance) on this logging subject if needed, but I do not feel skilled enough on the Pharo part to solve most (if not any) fogbugz cases I saw, I would certainly only do a mess (I'm sure I'm not the only one in that case, the sep is very high between using and solving cases). So to me just using it for now is a good way to get deeper into it and probably one day be skilled enough to help ... :) Take your area of expertise and see how you can improve Pharo. Because your expertise has a value. And
And I'm very sorry too that I cannot go to Pharo day, I would have loved to see presentations , meet some people, talk about it (logging tools or whatever) but I definitely can't . too bad :(
I know the feeling. Now you can help at different levels - produce something you like - read and review book chapters - ... stef