Decouple eslint from debug

The version of ESLint you are using. Latest

The problem you want to solve. Eliminate high coupling to debug

Your take on the correct solution to problem. Implement logging via a facade

Are you willing to submit a pull request to implement this change? Yes

Subject of the feature

Reduce coupling and footprint of minified file by using anylogger i.s.o debug

Problem

Currently, this library has a dependency on debug. Though that is an excellent library, this dependency has 2 major drawbacks:

• This library is now forcing debug onto all developers that use this library (high coupling)
• debug is 3.1kB minified and gzipped, directly adding 3.1kB to the minimum footprint of this library

Alternatives

Please have a look at anylogger. It’s a logging facade specifically designed for libraries. It achieves these goals:

• Decouple the library from the underlying logging framework
• Reduce the minimal bundle footprint. Anylogger is only 370 bytes.

The decoupling is achieved by only including the minimal facade to allow client code to do logging and using adapters to back that facade with an actual logging framework. The minimal footprint follows naturally from this decoupling as the bulk of the code lives in the adapter or logging library.

There are already adapters for some popular logging frameworks and more adapters can easily be created:

• anylogger-console (to use the console i.s.o some logging framework)
• anylogger-debug
• anylogger-loglevel
• anylogger-log4js
• ulog (logger with native anylogger support)

If this library were to switch to anylogger, you could still install debug as a dev-dependency and then require('anylogger-debug') in your tests to have your tests work exactly as they always did, with debug as the logging framework, while still decoupling it from debug for all clients.

Disclaimer: anylogger was written by me so I’m self-advertising here. However I do honestly believe it is the best solution in this situation and anylogger was written specifically to decrease coupling between libraries and logging frameworks because for any large application, devs typically end up with multiple loggers in their application because some libraries depend on debug, others on loglevel, yet others on log4js and so on. This hurts bundle size badly as we add multiple kB of logging libraries to it.

[nzakas]

Thanks for the discussion. We won’t be moving forward with this, so closing.

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@btmills Thank you, much appreciated! And yes I see why you don’t want to fix something that isn’t broken 😃