Older command-line behavior of -log might be more reasonable
On tor-talk, Jim reports:
I am wondering if this follows the principle of least surprise, at least with regard to logging. I was initially baffled why this release was not logging anything to the system log and thought it to be a bug. I then realized that the config file's "Log notice syslog" had been disabled by the command line's --log "notice stdout", which I was piping to a script. Expected behavior returned when I changed --log to --+log.
(See https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2011-December/022328.html )
This change was made so we could get defaults torrcs to work sensibly, and to restore sensible behavior for socksport, etc. But it breaks expectations for the log directive.
One option here is to have different options work differently.
Another option is to have the torrc->commandline border work differently from the defaults->torrc border.
And a third option is to say "yeah, we're changing old expectations here", and document it better.
Whatever we do, we should do it on an 0.2.3.x timeframe.