debug.rst

In your task code: when you call:

debug = lsstDebug.Info(__name__)

(with __name__ being the name of the current task), you are given a "debug object". By default that will return False for any attribute you access. Thus, you can do:

>>> debug.foo
False

>>> debug.bar
False

>>> debug.display
False

You can override the behaviour of the display object by using a debug.py file. In this, you want to define a function that, when called with __name__, as an argument will provide non-False values for certain combinations of __name__ and attribute. Thus, you can do things like:

>>> debug = lsstDebug.Info(__name__) # __name__ selects the current task
>>> debug.display
True

Then you can write your task to optionally enable a display (or whatever) by doing something like:

if debug.display:
   afwDisplay.getDisplay()....
else:
   self.log.debug("I would show you a pretty picture here if you enabled debugging.")

How to make this work? Create a debug.py in your working directory, and put something like this in it:

import lsstDebug
def DebugInfo(name):
    debug = lsstDebug.getInfo(name)
    if name == "lsst.meas.astrom.astrometry":
        debug.display = True
    return debug

lsstDebug.Info = DebugInfo

That should enable debugging when you are running inside lsst.meas.astrom.astrometry, and disable it elsewhere.

Of coruse, you can also return arbitrarily more complex objects, doing things like specifying the frame to display on etc. And I believe you can use the -d commmant line argument to pass a path to debug.py rather than using a working dir.