Reclassify INFO messages printed
When starting up the Arti proxy, the user gets to see various INFO messages printed to the console. While some of these are useful to the user and help them to see that there is some work being done, others are not helpful to the user and may be too cryptic even for debugging purposes.
This issue also impacts developers using Arti APIs since these log messages also are printed as INFO messages there.
Some examples:
-
INFO tor_dirmgr::state: The current consensus is fresh until 2023-05-08 17:00:00.0 +00:00:00, and valid until 2023-05-08 19:00:00.0 +00:00:00. I've picked 2023-05-08 17:45:54.445275799 +00:00:00 as the earliest time to replace it.
is not a good INFO message due to the fact that the user (for the most part) doesn't really understand what is going on here and doesn't need to see it in normal circumstances. -
INFO tor_circmgr::mgr: While waiting on circuit: Ok(Err(CircTimeout)) from circuit we're building
is also not a good INFO message since it is very vague (there is talk of aCircTimeout
so you can guess it is Circuit Timeout, but where in the circuit, or any other type of info is absent). Also since this is an error, this should be a WARN since technically it is the undesired path (circuits shouldn't fail).
An example of a good INFO message:
-
Listening on 127.0.0.1:9150
is something that the user understands AND cares about. Maybe we could make it clearer that it is SOCKS5 proxy, but that would be the only nitpick, and even that is a bit of a reach.
I am sure that we can find more messages that can be reclassified or reworded so they are more effectively conveying information.