ASB log is confusing

[ghost]

Hey guys
Why messages are not timestamped?
Is the log file rewritten every time asb is restarted? I've had restarted asb a few times before, but didn't notice anything and thought new messages get appended to it. Last time I restarted it a couple of hours ago; I just checked the log file and noticed some messages have disappeared, scrolled to the top and it seems to be rewritten. Although there are hundreds of "new connection/lost connection" messages which I doubt they are all for the past two hours.
Any idea what's happened?

[rishflab]

I just had a look at the code for the ASB and we don't do any logging to a file. It must be something to do with how/where you are piping the asb output. How are you running the ASB?

[ghost]

I followed @sethsimmons' guide which runs asb through sysetmd and logs the output to a file.
So, nothing's wrong with asb here. Sorry for the trouble, and thank you so much for clarifying the issue.

[thomaseizinger]

Messages are only timestamped if you run asb in an interactive terminal:

xmr-btc-swap/swap/src/asb/tracing.rs

Lines 22 to 26 in 413a2d3

	} else if is_terminal {
	builder.init();
	} else {
	builder.without_time().init();
	}

If you pipe the log messages to something else, that tool is expected to capture the timestamp. For example, if you run asb through systemd, journalctl will timestamp the log messages.

[thomaseizinger]

@rishflab We are probably trying to be too clever here and should just expose a switch on whether or not we want timestamps in the logs and let the user decide.

[rishflab]

alright, should be a quick fix.

[rishflab]

Should the timestamp flag apply to the json output. It seems inconsistent if it didn't but if we do, we introduce a breaking change for people parsing json.