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

[Christopher Nielsen]

Great question!

One of the key things this would allow us to do, is reduce our current Debug output, by outputting less-important details at Debug2 or Debug3. For example, if we don’t want to see some of the ui_debug messages from our various portgroups - like, say, the numerous messages related to adding port callbacks - we could modify those to output some things at ui_debug2 or ui_debug3.

So if we needed to diagnose precisely what portgroup callbacks are added, those diagnostic messages could be enabled by setting the output level [via the port command] to Debug2 or Debug3. But at the current Debug level, they’d be hidden, making things less verbose.

Does that make sense?


> On 2021-05-26-W, at 04:39, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
> 
>> 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 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?