[TheDong]

Let's say that you're an irc network operator trying to make the channel's entire history searchable (e.g. botbot.me type thing).

For absolute correctness, you'd want to record per-leaf and merge.

However, the last time I needed log-merging functionality was much more boring; some of my log-files were corrupted, and someone else had logfiles that weren't as extensive, thus I needed to munge the two together. The timings were subtly different (because that's how irc works), so I wrote custom code to munge them together, preferring his for the range of corruption.

So yes, I've needed that functionality, though it wasn't actually done due to a netsplit. I can foresee it being useful in the case of a netsplit if your logging is at the ircd level or you run one bot per leaf.

[tilpner]

I wonder whether any large network keeps logs of channels, let alone one per server. And if they do, they probably don't have much use for a merged log except for taking up less space.

My own IRC log tool [GH: tilpner/ilc] can be used to merge logs, but I rarely use that functionality.

For two log files "a" and "b", in weechats default log format:

    ilc sort -f weechat -i <(cat a b) | ilc dedup -f weechat

I've never tested this with logs over 200MB, but sort will read the combined log into memory, which is definitely not optimal.