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NVDA should log its version number immediately, at all log levels #9803

@XLTechie

Description

@XLTechie

Note: edited to reflect that NVDA does log version, just not soon enough IMO.

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Not a specific one, but to help debugging problems in general, and when doing software testing, I would like to see NVDA's version number in the log, as soon as possible. I think it should be included at the lowest level of logging where something is logged, which I believe is currently the "disabled" level.

Describe the solution you'd like

The log currently provides this as its first entry:

INFO - main (05:29:56.973):
Starting NVDA

I would like to see this replaced with something like:

INFO - main (05:29:56.973):
Starting NVDA, version alpha-17780,40bef374

Describe alternatives you've considered

There aren't any that I know of. I am used to working with Unix systems, where most everything that generates a log meant for debugging, includes the program's version unconditionally.

Additional context

When attempting to debug NVDA issues, it is sometimes useful to run several versions of NVDA sequentially. (edit) If NVDA is not set to at least info level logging in its saved config, or started with the necessary CLI option, and is only later set to a more detailed log level, the version is never logged.
(If started with a log level such as "warning" (--log-level=30), the version is not logged either, but neither is much else. Odd, since the "disabled" log level logs more, but I digress).

I had a case recently, where a failure mode was causing NVDA not to produce any log file under a particular circumstance. It thus became difficult to determine which of the files I was looking at, had been generated by which version of NVDA: the current one that just ran, or the one that ran before that because this one didn't clean up that one's log into nvda-old, etc.
Since these were different versions of NVDA, if the first or second log entry had included the NVDA version number, as most software does, this situation would have been a non-issue.

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