[MonoDevelop] Why not log all exceptions in MonoDevelop?

[Benjamin ZHU]

Dear MonoDevelop team,

I'm Jamie, a PhD student working on logging practices in software
development. Logging is a common programming practice used to assist in
tracking down bugs or unexpected behaviour. Currently, I have used
MonoDevelop as a target project and studied the logging statistics from its
source code.

Exceptions are generally used to capture the exceptional conditions that
disrupt the normal flow of code execution. Exception logging is important,
because these logs can provide strong indicators of the error sites and are
helpful at determining what went wrong. Some advocators point out that
logging all exceptions can greatly reduce the diagnosis time of
post-release failures. Also, logging all exceptions will not incur much
runtime overhead, because compared to other statements, the execution of
exception-handling code is much rarer during normal runs.

However, in my study in MonoDevelop, there are 4041 catch-blocks in total
and only 771 (19%) of them are logged. A significant portion of
catch-blocks are actually not logged. So I have the question:

1. How to decide whether to log an exception during development? What are
the concerns?
2. Why not log all exceptions? If doing so, what problems can be caused?

Thank you very much! Your reply can broaden my understanding on exception
logging.

Regards,
Jamie Zhu
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