See #12167 for background.

The BaseFix class creates a logger named with the filename when the set_filename method is called. This logger appears to never be used, but since set_filename could be called any number of times and loggers are effectively singletons and not garbage collected, this could lead to refleaks and unbounded memory usage for no benefit.

It's possible to output contextual information about a file being worked on without needing to create a logger with the filename.

I'm proposing that the references to the logger in BaseFix be removed, as the logger isn't used anyway, and the test suite runs without failures when the references are removed. This will allow progress on #12167.

If the logger attribute is part of the official API and Benjamin doesn’t think it wise to just remove it, I think we should either start deprecating it (using a property), or set it to a shared logger object instead of creating one per file.

I say kill the loggers.

New changeset dd004e85e299 by Vinay Sajip in branch 'default':
Closes #12536: Unused logger removed from lib2to3.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/dd004e85e299