Build tags are part of the conditional compilation system provided by the go tool. This is a quick post to discuss using build tags to selectively enable debug printing in a package.

This afternoon I merged a contribution to pkg/sftp which improved the packet encoding performance but introduced a bug where some packet types were incorrectly encoded.

% go test -integration
Unknown message 0
... oops

Turning on verbose got a little closer.

% go test -integration -v
=== RUN TestUnmarshalAttrs
--- PASS: TestUnmarshalAttrs (0.00s)
=== RUN TestNewClient
--- PASS: TestNewClient (0.00s)
=== RUN TestClientLstat
Unknown message 0

But each integration test sends many different packets, which one was at fault?

Rather than reaching for fmt.Println I took a few minutes to add conditional debugging to this package.
debug.go

// +build debug

package sftp

import "log"

func debug(fmt string, args ...interface{}) {
	log.Printf(fmt, args...)
}

release.go

// +build !debug

package sftp

func debug(fmt string, args ...interface{}) {}

Adding a call to debug inside sendPacket it was easy to figure out the packet which was being incorrectly encoded.

% go test -tags debug -integration -v -run=Lstat
2014/09/28 11:18:31 send packet sftp.sshFxInitPacket, len: 38
=== RUN TestClientLstat
2014/09/28 11:18:31 send packet sftp.sshFxInitPacket, len: 5
2014/09/28 11:18:31 send packet sftp.sshFxpLstatPacket, len: 62
Unknown message 0

Debugging is optional

When I committed the fix for this bug I didn’t have to spend any time removing the debug function calls inside the package.

When -tags debug is not present, the version from release.go, effectively a no-op, is used.

Extra credit

This package includes integration tests which are not run by default. How the -integration test flag works is left as an exercise to the reader.