> For spring boot, the default is actually logback.
I did not know this, thanks for letting me know!
> I update aggressively on my own projects to stay on top of changes and keep the effort related to mitigating compatibility issues at a minimum. A nice side effect is that you get all the latest security, performance, and other fixes. In my experience, updates get harder the further you fall behind.
This is absolutely a best practice, though I think people struggle with it for all sorts of reasons. In general one of the downsides of maintaining a diverse codebase is that this constant update cycle becomes more and more difficult, and it's one of the things that I find drives towards more consistent tooling within a team.
> I work with a lot of customers running ancient versions of whatever for no other reason than that they seem a combination of fearful, ignorant, and indifferent about what will break because they can't be bothered to even try.
While I agree this is something people need to get over, we have to take some blame for this as an industry. A lot of people have bad experiences with upstream Shiny Object Syndrome.
Using logging facades means that libraries don't need to update -- which is great -- but libraries were never directly vulnerable anyway. log4j is, to my knowledge, still by far the most common actual implementation of logging in the Java ecosystem. The assertion that it's not popular for logging only holds if you assume that logging facades are logging implementations, which they are not.
My completely-unverified guess would be that there are more people immune to this issue because they never migrated past log4j 1.x than there are who are immune because they picked up Logback or something similar.
> You shouldn't need to pour over code to figure it out.
This is true but as sibling comments have pointed out, a lot of other software you might be deploying without having written or configured the logging for are written in Java.
I did not know this, thanks for letting me know!
> I update aggressively on my own projects to stay on top of changes and keep the effort related to mitigating compatibility issues at a minimum. A nice side effect is that you get all the latest security, performance, and other fixes. In my experience, updates get harder the further you fall behind.
This is absolutely a best practice, though I think people struggle with it for all sorts of reasons. In general one of the downsides of maintaining a diverse codebase is that this constant update cycle becomes more and more difficult, and it's one of the things that I find drives towards more consistent tooling within a team.
> I work with a lot of customers running ancient versions of whatever for no other reason than that they seem a combination of fearful, ignorant, and indifferent about what will break because they can't be bothered to even try.
While I agree this is something people need to get over, we have to take some blame for this as an industry. A lot of people have bad experiences with upstream Shiny Object Syndrome.