Logging has been in the Python stdlib for over a dozen years, and in all that time, no one else has had a problem with the way handler locks and formatting work in logging. Your problem arises because your use case is very unusual, and this is why I don't propose to make changes to the stdlib to cater for it. You can, as I've suggested earlier, subclass the handlers you need and implement their emit methods as per your needs. Any changes to the stdlib code along the lines you've proposed could well break existing code for other people, so making these changes is not warranted.