https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/221

The current terminology of "task failure" often causes problems when
writing or speaking about code. You often want to talk about the
possibility of an operation that returns a Result "failing", but cannot
because of the ambiguity with task failure. Instead, you have to speak
of "the failing case" or "when the operation does not succeed" or other
circumlocutions.

Likewise, we use a "Failure" header in rustdoc to describe when
operations may fail the task, but it would often be helpful to separate
out a section describing the "Err-producing" case.

We have been steadily moving away from task failure and toward Result as
an error-handling mechanism, so we should optimize our terminology
accordingly: Result-producing functions should be easy to describe.

To update your code, rename any call to `fail!` to `panic!` instead.
Assuming you have not created your own macro named `panic!`, this
will work on UNIX based systems:

    grep -lZR 'fail!' . | xargs -0 -l sed -i -e 's/fail!/panic!/g'

You can of course also do this by hand.

[breaking-change]

Also, remove one that has an exact duplicate.

This commit switches over the backtrace infrastructure from piggy-backing off
the RUST_LOG environment variable to using the RUST_BACKTRACE environment
variable (logging is now disabled in libstd).

This commit moves all logging out of the standard library into an external
crate. This crate is the new crate which is responsible for all logging macros
and logging implementation. A few reasons for this change are:

* The crate map has always been a bit of a code smell among rust programs. It
  has difficulty being loaded on almost all platforms, and it's used almost
  exclusively for logging and only logging. Removing the crate map is one of the
  end goals of this movement.

* The compiler has a fair bit of special support for logging. It has the
  __log_level() expression as well as generating a global word per module
  specifying the log level. This is unfairly favoring the built-in logging
  system, and is much better done purely in libraries instead of the compiler
  itself.

* Initialization of logging is much easier to do if there is no reliance on a
  magical crate map being available to set module log levels.

* If the logging library can be written outside of the standard library, there's
  no reason that it shouldn't be. It's likely that we're not going to build the
  highest quality logging library of all time, so third-party libraries should
  be able to provide just as high-quality logging systems as the default one
  provided in the rust distribution.

With a migration such as this, the change does not come for free. There are some
subtle changes in the behavior of liblog vs the previous logging macros:

* The core change of this migration is that there is no longer a physical
  log-level per module. This concept is still emulated (it is quite useful), but
  there is now only a global log level, not a local one. This global log level
  is a reflection of the maximum of all log levels specified. The previously
  generated logging code looked like:

    if specified_level <= __module_log_level() {
        println!(...)
    }

  The newly generated code looks like:

    if specified_level <= ::log::LOG_LEVEL {
        if ::log::module_enabled(module_path!()) {
            println!(...)
        }
    }

  Notably, the first layer of checking is still intended to be "super fast" in
  that it's just a load of a global word and a compare. The second layer of
  checking is executed to determine if the current module does indeed have
  logging turned on.

  This means that if any module has a debug log level turned on, all modules
  with debug log levels get a little bit slower (they all do more expensive
  dynamic checks to determine if they're turned on or not).

  Semantically, this migration brings no change in this respect, but
  runtime-wise, this will have a perf impact on some code.

* A `RUST_LOG=::help` directive will no longer print out a list of all modules
  that can be logged. This is because the crate map will no longer specify the
  log levels of all modules, so the list of modules is not known. Additionally,
  warnings can no longer be provided if a malformed logging directive was
  supplied.

The new "hello world" for logging looks like:

    #[phase(syntax, link)]
    extern crate log;

    fn main() {
        debug!("Hello, world!");
    }

These are relics that serve no purpose.

Who doesn't like a massive renaming?

The entire testsuite is converted to using info! rather than debug!
because some depend on the code within the debug! being trans'd.

This changes the indexing syntax from .() to [], the vector syntax from ~[] to
[] and the extension syntax from #fmt() to #fmt[]