feat(android): route slog to logcat

Every slog line the app wrote on Android went to /dev/null, including
the one naming the error it was about to os.Exit on. #52 is what that
cost: a process that vanished with no tombstone, no AndroidRuntime
stack and nothing in `logcat -b crash`, at Priority/Critical for
months, whose entire diagnosis was one sLogger.Error main.go was
already writing.

backend/androidlog is a slog.Handler over __android_log_write, chosen
in main() by build tag rather than by a runtime check so that a desktop
binary links no cgo for a platform it cannot run on.

**Everything except the write itself is untagged.** That is
androidpayload.go's discipline pushed as far as it goes: the only
toolchain that compiles the android tag is a cross-compiler and the
only thing that runs it is a phone, so the priority mapping, the
formatting, the chunking and the handler's own attr and group
bookkeeping are ordinary Go that `go test` exercises everywhere, and
android.go is fifteen lines that hand a string to liblog.

Four things in it are load-bearing.

**The tag is a fixed string, not the application id.** The debug build
carries `applicationIdSuffix ".dev"` so it can be installed beside the
release app, and it is the only build whose WebView can be inspected --
so a tag derived from the id is a different tag on the one build
anybody debugging this app is running, and the filter meant to show
these lines would hide them exactly where they were being looked for.

**The priorities are android/log.h's own values, asserted twice.**
android.go carries constant expressions that do not compile as uint if
the header renumbers; the untagged test writes the six numbers out
longhand, because comparing a constant to itself passes on any
renumbering. A wrong priority is the failure that hides rather than
breaks -- logcat prints whatever number it is handed, so an Error filed
as Info is present, correct, and invisible to every filter.

**Formatting is delegated to slog's TextHandler.** WithAttrs and
WithGroup are the half of slog.Handler that is easy to get subtly
wrong, and a logger whose groups are wrong is a logger nobody reads.
The derived handlers share the parent's buffer *and its mutex*: a
second mutex would guard nothing, and two loggers derived from one
would splice their bytes into a single line under load.

**A line is chunked, because liblog drops what does not fit.** The
kernel logger's entry is 4068 bytes for tag and message together and
the remainder goes without comment, so a long record would be truncated
in the middle of the thing worth reading.

Time and level are dropped from the formatted line, since logcat stamps
every entry with both -- and dropping them by *key* also ate a caller's
own "level" attribute, which the on-device probe caught and
TestACallersOwnLevelAttrSurvives now holds. ReplaceAttr sees an empty
group path for the built-ins and for every top-level attribute alike,
so the kinds are what separate them.

Verified on the reference device (TLP301, Android 14): a debug build
logs I/W/E under the `yellowjacket` tag at the right priorities, and
the first thing it surfaced was a real warning nobody could previously
see -- `champion index rebuild failed ... disk I/O error (6410)`.

Closes #160
This commit is contained in:
2026-08-21 16:30:32 -04:00
parent 7eb55bd378
commit 168e588387
8 changed files with 732 additions and 14 deletions
@@ -8,13 +8,29 @@ This tier answers "does the phone build run", nothing else. It is not a
spec tier, it does not run in CI, and the app is not a usable Android
player yet (plan 015 says why, at length).
## Three facts that make failure invisible
## Two facts that make failure invisible
**Go's stdout does not reach logcat.** An Android app's fd 1 and 2 go to
`/dev/null`. Every `slog` line the app writes is discarded — including
the one naming the error it is about to exit on. `setprop
log.redirect-stdio true` does not help: it redirects the *Java*
runtime's `System.out`, and the Go code is a c-shared native library.
There were three. The first was that **Go's stdout does not reach
logcat** — an Android app's fd 1 and 2 go to `/dev/null`, so every
`slog` line the app wrote was discarded, including the one naming the
error it was about to exit on. That is fixed (#160):
`backend/androidlog` is a `slog.Handler` over `__android_log_write`,
selected in `main()` by build tag, and the app's whole diagnostic
stream now arrives under the `yellowjacket` tag, which `make
android-logs` filters for.
What remains true about it is the part that misleads: **`setprop
log.redirect-stdio true` still does not help**, because it redirects
the *Java* runtime's `System.out` and the Go code is a c-shared native
library. Nothing that reaches logcat here does so through stdout, so
anything printed with `fmt.Println` is still lost. Log with `slog`.
The tag is a fixed string rather than the application id, and that is
load-bearing rather than tidy: the debug build carries
`applicationIdSuffix ".dev"` so it can be installed beside the release
app, and it is the only build whose WebView can be inspected — so a tag
derived from the id would be filtered out on the one build anybody
debugging this app is running.
**`os.Exit` is a silent death.** `main()` ends several failure paths in
`os.Exit(1)`. From Android's side that is a process that vanished:
@@ -34,7 +50,10 @@ the wrong question. `make android-smoke` asks the right one — is it the
The tell, once you know it: `I/WailsBridge: Wails bridge initialized`
followed immediately by a new pid doing the same thing. That means the
native library loaded, the JNI bridge came up, Go's `main()` ran, and
`main()` left. Work backwards through its `os.Exit(1)` paths.
`main()` left. Work backwards through its `os.Exit(1)` paths — and
since #160, **read the `E/yellowjacket` line above it first**, because
every one of those paths logs the error before it exits. That line is
what #52 spent months without.
## What to run