MacPorts Base: Support for a lower level of debug output, like ui_trace, or ui_debug2/ui_debug3?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On May 24, 2021, at 10:13, Christopher Nielsen wrote:

> Has there been any thoughts/interest in implementing another level (or two) of debug output, providing more detail than we get at Debug? That would allow us to optionally output more diagnostic info in various areas, such as our portgroups, without flooding the logs when running at our present Debug level.
> 
> I’ve found this extremely helpful in the various projects I’ve worked on over the years. And it would certainly benefit us too.
> 
> In many of the common logging frameworks, such a level is sometimes called Trace. That terminology might be confusing within MacPorts, given that we support trace mode. So perhaps we would want to name it differently. (Debug2 and Debug3?)
> 
> But naming aside, has anyone else considered the general idea? Thoughts?

I don't believe this has been proposed before.

(I did propose a "developer" mode before, where developers could opt in to receive information that is relevant for developers but which would only confuse users, either globally or possibly limited just to ports they maintain for example.)

I personally find debug mode too verbose already and think we should reduce the amount of information produced by debug mode. Consider the amount of information printed by a port that does a batch reinplace -q over every file, for example, or the amount of information printed about each dependency.

Can you give specific examples of the type of information you would like to see in your proposed new output mode?