Watchdog should work, even if the error is too early, before module.inc is loaded

It definitely applies to 7.x.

Try it: add a watchdog() call to cache_set(), and visit admin/build/menu and see what happens with or without the patch.

This is much nicer of course, but still does not cover all cases, if we are too early.

It will cover the case where you add watchdog() calls in cache.inc, but if you add it in settings.php, Drupal will still die, whereas my original patch will not.

Attaching a version that uses a configuration variable.

Not silly at all.

I had that same problem on drupal.org, when testing it on scratch.

There was a line in settings.php saying:

if ($blah) { something ...}

Yet, $blah is really one of the $_SERVER['variable_name'], and no line preceding it to say:

$blah = $_SERVER['variable_name'];

Once I applied the watchdog backport patch the site died because of the undefined variable error, because drupal_error_handler() got triggered.

I found a better solution, but not without drawbacks. Instead of using our own log file, we use PHP's error_log, and that will log it to the web servers' log. This has the advantage of always being there, regardless, and needs no configuration. But, on some shared hosts it may not be accessible.

I guess now that we are using error_log(), this is no longer a hack, and hence changing the title.

The only part that needs polish is the serialize format used.

We use this in the dblog module:

t($dblog->message, unserialize($dblog->variables));

But that is not all that is needed, there is the severity, type, link (if present) and user, and we have to do all that on one line, and make it look pretty.

Here is an example of why this patch is needed http://drupal.org/cvs?commit=150381, albeit on Drupal 6 (which we should port this patch to).

Here is a reroll.

Better formatting of the message when logging to error_log() to make it human readable. This is similar to what syslog.module does already.

Only chx can read serialized arrays on the fly, though he recommended this for mere mortals ...

Here is a patch that centralizes the code for both watchdog() and syslog.module.

Look! Alligators!

Dries,

Here is some background:

Starting from Drupal 6, the ability to log to different places is a configurable feature, depending on the module you enable (dblog.module, syslog.module or emaillog.module from contrib, I can add webserverlog.module to contrib or core if you want it there, just ask).

However, this patch is not about that. It preserves the selection a site admin makes on where to log stuff, but provides a fallback mechanism for those situations where there is an early failure before the module system is initialized

This is useful in mainly developer centric or advanced cases, for example when you enable a custom caching module, or when we are still stabilizing PDO (e.g. key length, data type, ..etc.)

So, this patch is mainly DX, not UX, and will come in handy in many cases.

chx

I hear you about bootstrap bloat. But I don't like the hard coded path include. webchick does not like it either. Any other options? Can we move the format_error_message() function to common.inc? Is that early enough?