We just got bit upgrading to logback 1.5.28 from 1.5.27 thinking it was a patch release, and it broke our logging. I see now that logback does not use semver versioning.

I found this in the release notes:

• Appender names or appender references are no longer subject to variable substitution.

Is there a suggested workaround for cases where people rely on this functionality to pick their log appender, being able to adjust it externally from environment variables?

Here is an excerpt from our logback.xml

    <appender name="CONSOLE" class="ch.qos.logback.core.ConsoleAppender">
        <encoder>
            <pattern>%d{HH:mm:ss.SSS} %-5level %logger{36} - %msg%n</pattern>
        </encoder>
    </appender>
...
    <root level="TRACE">
        <appender-ref ref="\${LOGBACK_APPENDER:-CONSOLE}"/>
    </root>