Weird severity levels - RFC 5424

[theduke]

How did you arrive at the weird numerical values for the logging levels?

RFC5424 still defines the values as 7 for debug to 0 for emergency.
Pretty much every system I know uses those values.

The priority according to 5424 is Facility*8 + severity, but you are obviously not using that either.

[Seldaek]

The levels more or less follow the HTTP status codes - but more importantly they leave enough room for adding custom levels in between if needed. Which sequential numbers don't allow.

Why is it that you ask? It's kind of an internal thing that should not really affect users as far as I can tell.

[EnoahNetzach]

@Seldaek interoperability, for starter.

I have to manage log levels that are given by my system through environment variables, following this weird standard, that is only remotely supposed to follow RFC 5424.

Priorities are well defined (as @theduke was saying), and names are also well defined (you use INFO, uppercase, abbreviated; The standard is Informational).

I find also this comment ("Logging levels from syslog protocol defined in RFC 5424") to be very disorienting..