alt Hacker NewsHow I'd personally like to treat them:
- Critical / Fatal: Unrecoverable without human intervention, someone needs to get out of bed, now.
- Error : Recoverable without human intervention, but not without data / state loss. Must be fixed asap. An assumption didn't hold.
- Warning: Recoverable without intervention. Must have an issue created and prioritised. ( If business as usual, this could be downgrading to INFO. )
So for example, a failure to parse JSON might be an error if you're responsible for generating that serialisation, but might be a warning if you're not.
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Also, warnings for ambiguous results.
For example, when a process implies a conversion according to the contract/convention, but we know that this conversion may be not the expected result and the input may be based on semantic misconceptions. E.g., assemblers and contextually truncated values for operands: while there's no issue with the grammar or syntax or intrinsic semantics, a higher level misconception may be involved (e.g., regarding address modes), resulting in a correct but still non-functional output. So, "In this individual case, there may be or may be not an issue. Please, check. (Not resolvable on our end.)"
(Disclaimer: I know that this is a very much classic computing and that this is now mostly moved to the global TOS, but still, it's the classic example for a warning.)
> The main difference therefore between error and warning is, "We didn't think this could happen" vs "We thought this might happen".
What about conditions like "we absolutely knew this would happen regularly, but it's something that prevents the completion of the entire process which is absolutely critical to the organization"
The notion of an "error" is very context dependent. We usually use it to mean "can not proceed with action that is required for the successful completion of this task"
Yea but instead of log Critical/Fatal and go on, I would just panic() the program. To the other definitions I agree - everything else is recoverable, because the program still runs.
Warning to me is an error that has very little business logic side effects/impact as opposed to an Error, but still requires attention.
What if you are integrated to a third party app and it gives you 5xx once? What do you log it as, and let's say after a retry it is fine.
hmm maybe we need extra representation?
eg: 2.0 for "trace" / 1.0 for "debug" / 0.0 for "info" / -1.0 for "warn" / -2.0 for "error that can be handled"
I like to think of “warning” as something to alert on statistically, e.g. incorrect password attempt rate jumps from 0.4% of login attempts to 99%.