Reduce default verbosity of the package

[MeyerBender]

In my experience, spatialdata-plot is quite verbose. While detailed logging is very helpful for warnings and debugging, I often encounter a wall of text even when everything is working correctly. This is due to the extensive use of logger.info() throughout the codebase.

Although users can manually adjust the logging level, I think the default behavior could be less verbose for normal, successful execution. I would suggest to either remove the logger.info() calls entirely, or introduce a verbose argument for the relevant methods (defaulting to False).

I’d be happy to have a go at this, but wanted to gather some opinions first. Is this a change that would be welcome?

[timtreis]

Agree with you, but I probably would implement this as a global switch similar to scanpy.set_figure_params rather than at the function level.

Opinions @ilan-gold @flying-sheep ?

[ilan-gold]

Without knowing more, I'm a big fan of settings objects. They have the risk of making everything a setting so you need to be judicious, but this is a great use-case

[MeyerBender]

Implemented in #524 — logging verbosity can now be controlled globally via spatialdata_plot.set_verbosity(). By default, INFO messages are suppressed.

You can test it with:

import spatialdata_plot
from spatialdata.datasets import blobs

blob = blobs()

# this used to trigger printing of an info message
# now it just outputs the plot
blob.pl.render_shapes("blobs_circles", method='datashader').pl.show()

# to get the old, more verbose behavior
spatialdata_plot.set_verbosity(True)
blob.pl.render_shapes("blobs_circles", method='datashader').pl.show()

Let me know if this is in line with what you envisioned or if I should change anything.