Debug Package?

[rcoup]

Since Mapnik's logging is a compile-time option, I'm wondering about creating debug packages, which use Provides: to sit in place of the normal packages, but are compiled with DEBUG=True.

Specifically, libmapnik-debug and mapnik-input-plugin-*-debug. I don't think it's worth doing the Python bindings.

So, to get debug logging, you can do apt-get install libmapnik-debug and it'll replace the existing libmapnik package with a logging-enabled version. Same for the plugins. Want to stop debugging, apt-get install libmapnik again.

(Using -debug and not -dbg since the latter is commonly used for debug symbols -- which we should also do, but are a different issue)

Any thoughts?

[springmeyer]

This would be great. What about just switching the default for DEFAULT_LOG_SEVERITY from error to warn for the normal packages? Would that address what you need or are you aiming to get at the logs from debug level?

Though the real issue - I'm remembering now after reading https://github.com/mapnik/mapnik/wiki/Logging#compile-time-options - is that ENABLE_LOG needs to be defined. I wonder if we should just remove this limitation? If we could determine that there is no performance impact if ENABLE_LOG is defined then it would be safe.

[springmeyer]

The idea of a second package however I think would be just fine - although I wonder if it should just be libmapnik-dbg that combines the idea of debug symbols and logging in one?