Create NTLogAppender

[mcm001]

I don't think this adds much bandwidth, and massively helps debug photon when looking at wpilogs of NT data

based on #1298

[srimanachanta]

Looks good to me but I think debug options should have the ability to be disabled. That is a lot of work though so...

[mcm001]

It's super easy to must not send debug prints to NT, if we want?

[srimanachanta]

It's super easy to must not send debug prints to NT, if we want?

I meant more adding a UI toggle to handle logging to NT

[mcm001]

Yeah idk. Unless teams see a legit value add from having photon logs in their wpilogs, I may punt on this one

[srimanachanta]

Yeah idk. Unless teams see a legit value add from having photon logs in their wpilogs, I may punt on this one

I think it would be useful, especially for teams that do log

[TheTripleV]

On 2nd thought, maybe the rio nt server will get bogged down. Logging rio console to wpilog via advantagekit slowed things down for us.

Instead, maybe it would be better for photonlib to publish the name of the wpilog and have photon live rename the log file to match what the wpilog is called.

[mcm001]

That's decently clean. I do think we can reevaluate this come 2027 (ROSconsole, for example, is a thing and exists). Wanna make an issue to track auto-renaming logs instead? Or at the very least print in the log when valid match number is sent?

[mcm001]

I'm inclined to merge this -- if nobody subscribes to the topic, nothing should happen I believe? Need to confirm with @PeterJohnson that a topic published by a client with no subscribers doesn't actually get sent to the server.

[PeterJohnson]

Currently it still gets sent to the server, although I’m looking at fixing that soon.

[mcm001]

Happy to cut an issue to track that in allwpilib