In case anyone is looking for a debug utility, not for archival logs, look no further than http://github.com/visionmedia/debug. Named loggers, nice formatting, easy to use and you get timers for free:
then selectively enable it in the command-line with
DEBUG=controllers:* node index.js
Express has debug built-in, so setting debug to express:* will turn on logging for it's internals. Just saying this 'cause I wish more tools came with built-in logging :)
Not directly related, but the author mentioned Winston, which made me think: who are these people using Node.js that don't need log rotation? Winston doesn't have built-in support. The only logging library I've found that supports this without extra effort is log4node.[1]
Long-running programs will happily continue using the same file handle until they are signaled in some way to reopen the file path (usually in response to USR1 and HUP). See Nginx, Apache httpd, MongoDB, etc.
I wouldn't exactly call Python's logging module glorious. Its API is unintuitive and foreign (lifted from Java), any customisation requires subclassing and it destroys performance on PyPy (because of the constant use of sys.exc_info().
I'd like to use this on some of my projects but I know the dev is going to receive a cease & desist from Intel sooner rather than later, breaking dependencies.
OP - could you rename the library to make us all feel a little bit better about using it?