[OpenLayers-Dev] OpenLayers 'Debug Mode'

[Christopher Schmidt]

A bunch of times, we've run into problems where the answer has been "It
would be really nice to let the user know that they are doing something
which is probably wrong, but we don't have a way to inform them." In the
past, OpenLayers had fancy debugging tools, the need for which has
largely been removed by Firebug. However, we oftentimes run into cases
where a user is doing something that they don't really want to do, but
they don't know it. 

For example, #248, "Map allows layers to be added twice", is a case
where a user was adding the same layer to the map twice. The patch I've
added prevents this from happening -- but there is no way to say to the
user 'you probably didn't mean to do that'.

Clearly, we don't want to be littering OpenLayers with 'alert'
statements, but at the same time, it might be nice to have a way to put
OpenLayers into a 'debug' mode, where these things can be reported to
the user, either via 'alert()' calls or via console.log() or something
similar. (I don't want to pull in a full logging framework if we can
avoid it.)

This mode should not be the default, but an option on the map could
allow a user to turn it on. The map object could support a 'log()'
method, which could then report things to the user.

I can't think of the other cases this has come up, but I know they
exist. What do people think about adding this in -- possibly not for
2.4, but maybe for 2.5?  

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
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