a) Loggers don't have a one-to-one correspondence to files that are
opened, so I don't quite understand your point. Perhaps you are
conflating loggers with handlers. The common way of using logging is to
have a small number of file-based handlers and perhaps a socket handler
and console handler, working with a potentially much larger number of
loggers.

b) If you want to propose a patch (incl. tests and docs) which maintains
backward compatibility, I'll certainly look at it.

the qualname *is* compulsory as it determines exactly which logger is
instantiated. So I don't understand your statement.

c) Having used log4py (which I'm not familiar with), it may be that you
have to consider that Python's logging package might do some things
differently. You are of course free to use your own configuration format
- it's one of those areas where personal taste is more of a factor. I
don't know of any alternative formats which have a lot of traction for
configuring logging specifically, though the programmatic API for
configuring logging is pretty simple and almost any other configuration
approach could be made to fit.

It's funny to hear you comment on the inappropriateness of curly braces
in Python, how do you manage without dict literals? ;-)

It's probably best not to continue this discussion on the issue tracker
- it's not the best place as it's not its intended purpose, and also the
audience here will be much smaller than, say, comp.lang.python. Before
rolling your own config format, I would suggest posting on c.l.py with
your difficulties with logging configuration and see how others have
coped with those or similar problems.