dear monkists,

to make debugging easy, I would like to do any of the following to turn debugging on or off, specifically in a mod_perl deployed application;

• set a var as in $debug
• set a constant DEBUG, that is global for all packages
• set a function sub debug()

I note in 2001, that this was discussed before.

My questions are thus;

• whats the best way to do this in mod_perl(Apache2) these days?
• does there exist a PerlSetConstant or equiv directive?
• are there any overarching DEBUG harnesses (perhaps in CPAN) that are handy ?

thanks in advance

update

Thank you for the advice, I decided to go down the following route to get what I wanted; e.g. flexible logging, with assertions and DEBUG flag... with a roughly accurate timing mechanism.

use Benchmark::Stopwatch;
use Log::Log4perl;
use Carp::Assert;
*ADEBUG = *DEBUG;
undef *DEBUG;

the DEBUG constant is defined by both Log::Log4perl and Carp::Assert ... so I had to redefine it.

With this setup, I can reuse Carp::Assert PERL_NDEBUG env variable for controlling execution of DEBUG statements and assertions. This is easily set in either Apache using PerlSetEnv directive or setting/exporting environment variable on underlying OS

I also included benchmarking, which activates only if DEBUG is enabled

    $stopwatch = Benchmark::Stopwatch->new->start if DEBUG;

update 2 I now find that Devel::NYTProf::Apache can completely replace this approach in mod_perl apps

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