Add adr-8: Replace logging and error reporting infrastructure with tracing.

Author: mhammond

docs/adr/0008-use-tracing.md

@@ -0,0 +1,137 @@
+# Replace logging and error reporting infrastructure with tracing.
+
+* Status: proposed
+* Deciders:
+  * AppServices team: ..
+  * moz-central releng/build teams: ?
+* Date: Mar 2025
+* Feedback deadline: ?
+
+## Context and Problem Statement
+
+Rust code in [application-services](https://github.com/mozilla/application-services/) needs support for diagnostics.
+Specifically, we need support for logging and for error reporting.
+
+### Logging
+
+Our components must be able to send logging to the browser - all platforms capture some logging.
+
+We currently use the `log` crate and wire this up best we can.
+
+### Error Reporting
+There's an [error support crate](https://github.com/mozilla/application-services/tree/main/components/support/error),
+designed explicitly for error reporting for the applications.
+Android and iOS both hook into this to report errors to Sentry, whereas Desktop has not yet implemented this functionality, but could probably benefit if it did.
+
+### Problems with the current approaches.
+
+#### Problems using `log`
+
+The main problem with the `log` module is the concept of a [global "max level"](https://docs.rs/cli-log/latest/cli_log/fn.set_max_level.html)
+that's set for all crates.
+Gecko sets the global max level to `Info` - any more verbose causes [performance regressions in other crates](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1874215).
+
+In practice, this means that we are unable to get debug logs for individual components.
+
+#### Problems with the error reporter
+
+None for mobile - but is not implemented at all for Desktop.
+
+So while there's actually no real problem here, there is an opportunity to better align the
+logging and error-reporting requirements into a single facility while introducing this capability
+to desktop.
+
+## The Rust tracing crate.
+
+An alternative to the `log` crate is the [`tracing`](https://docs.rs/tracing/latest/tracing/) crate,
+which comes from the tokio project.
+
+`tracing` has a very similar API to the `log` crate - `log::trace!` becomes `tracing::trace!` etc.
+It has richer semantics than `log` (eg, async support) and largely acts a replacement -
+it supports the `RUST_LOG` environment variable and writes to `stdout`,
+so developers who are running tests and our CI etc should notice no difference.
+
+Importantly, it has a [`tracing-subscriber`](https://docs.rs/tracing-subscriber/latest/tracing_subscriber/)
+mechanism that allows efficient, more targettted filtering instead of a global `max_level`.
+Each subscriber is able to filter log events without impacting crates they aren't subscribed to.
+
+This means that it should be viable to have some crates capture `trace!()` output without impacting any other crates
+or the overall performance of the application.
+
+## Proposal: Move to tracing for all app-services crates.
+
+This document proposes that:
+
+* All app-services crates move to using `tracing` instead of `log`.
+
+* All exiting handling of log events be replaced with a new mechanism based on
+  [`tracing-subscriber`](https://docs.rs/tracing-subscriber/latest/tracing_subscriber/)
+  to move logs and error-reports across the FFI.
+
+* We use the same mechanism for error reporting, leveraging the richer metadata offered by tracing.
+
+There are ways to make both `log` and `tracing` work, but we should avoid that if we can, just lean into tracing.
+
+## Implementation: Move to tracing for all app-services crates.
+
+This section describes the changes necessary to implement the above.
+
+### Move all our crates to `tracing`
+
+Most crates use `log::debug!()`/`log::error!()`, which changes to `tracing::...` (do we change them to just `debug!()`?)
+
+Many tests start with `env_logger::try_init().unwrap()` or similar - we'll have a test helper.
+
+### Implement a `tracing_subscriber::Layer`-based "subscriber" mechanism.
+
+This subscriber mechanism requires the application to know all tracing `targets` it cares about.
+Each crate is its own target and the app must explicitly "subscribe" to all targets individually.
+It will *not* be possible to subscribe to all targets and it's unlikely we'll allow
+any "matching" capabilities (eg, regular expressions or similar) - each target will use an exact string match.
+
+This requires our applications to configure their own subscriptions to each `target` with the level for that target,
+making it possible to avoid a single, global max-level.
+
+We'll implement this subscriber with a simple `HashMap` mapping the target name to a level.
+Once we have determined a subscriber matches an event, we can perform relatively expensive operations
+on the event because we assume action will be taken on the event.
+This assumption seems fine because we own all the subscribers.
+
+An example of these "relatively expensive" operations is fetching event "fields", such as the message or other meta-data,
+and using them to format a string, and dispatching the end result to the underlying logging
+system.
+
+Note that this is generic enough to handle traditional "log" messages and our error reporting requirements. It's a general event reporting system.
+
+[There's a WIP for all the above here](https://github.com/mozilla/application-services/compare/main...mhammond:application-services:log-to-tracing)
+
+### Replace all existing "subscribers"
+
+There are 3 main places which would change in the first instance, broken down by platform
+
+#### Mobile
+
+[A WIP for this is also included here](https://github.com/mozilla/application-services/compare/main...mhammond:application-services:log-to-tracing)
+
+#### Desktop
+
+Desktop has a [hand-written xpcom-based log adaptor](https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/services/sync/golden_gate/src/log.rs#119-120). This would be removed entirely and a uniffi-based callback mechanism is used. Rust code calling back into Javascript has the same semantics as `golden_gate` - the log calls are "fire and forget", ending up in the main thread automatically.
+
+The [`gecko-logger`](https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/xpcom/rust/gecko_logger/src/lib.rs) crate would change:
+* All application-services log-related code would be removed entirely (eg, [here](https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/services/interfaces/mozIAppServicesLogger.idl) and [here](https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/services/common/app_services_logger)) -
+app-services would not rely on `log` at all in this world.
+* `gecko-logger` (or a similar crate next to it) would grow support for owning the single tracing-subscriber. It would be responsible for adding a single app-services owned `tracing_subscriber::Layer` instance to the single subscriber.
+
+The [app-services-logger](https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/services/common/app_services_logger/src/lib.rs) would lose all xpcom-related code and instead lean on uniffi and tracing-subscriber.
+
+#### Application Services
+
+* All crates move to `tracing` instead of `log`
+
+* A new crate would be added which defines the application callback interfaces (via UniFFI) and
+  also the new tracing-subscriber implementation.
+
+* The crates `rust-log-forwarder` and `error-reporter` crates would keep their external interface
+  but would have their internal implementation replaced with the subscriber. This is for backwards
+  compatibility with mobile - eventually we'd expose the new callback interfaces to mobile and delete
+  these crates entirely.

docs/adr/README.md

@@ -11,6 +11,8 @@ This log lists the architectural decisions for MADR.
 * [ADR-0004](0004-early-startup-experiments.md) - Running experiments on first run early startup
 * [ADR-0005](0005-remote-settings-client.md) - A remote-settings client for our mobile browsers.
 * [ADR-0007](0007-limit-visits-migration-to-10000.md) - Limit Visits Migrated to Places History in Firefox iOS
+* [ADR-0008](0008-use-tracing.md) - Replace logging and error reporting infrastructure with tracing.
+
 
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