Does 'debug' cache the DEBUG environment variable somewhere? Getting no output after changing namespace and DEBUG env var.

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
electron, javascript, typescript
Domain
tooling

Research direction

Start by reproducing the namespace change from foo to bar in the debug initialization, checking how process.env.DEBUG is read and how log.enabled differs. Run the Electron Forge command with cross-env DEBUG=bar and compare output for both namespaces; done means the observed namespace behavior is explained and the issue is either resolved or clearly documented.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

I am using 'debug' with TypeScript in an Electron project like so:

import debug from 'debug';
const log = debug('foo');

export default async function myFunction(name: string) {
  log('calling myFunction');
  ...
  log('successfully returning myFunction');
  return someVariable;
}

in my shell (zsh) I set the DEBUG env var like so export DEBUG=foo and then started running my application. Everything worked fine. Eventually, I changed the namespace from foo to bar and now no matter what I do, I cannot get any output. I tried resetting DEBUG, I restarted my shell and set the environment variable again with export DEBUG=bar, I tried using the [cross-env]{https://www.npmjs.com/package/cross-env} to set it like so:

"scripts": {
    "start": "tsc && cross-env DEBUG=bar NODE_ENV=development electron-forge start",
    ...
}

but nothing ever shows up.
I tried

import debug from 'debug';
const log = debug('bar');

console.log("DEBUG", process.env.DEBUG);

export default async function myFunction(name: string) {
  log('calling myFunction');
  ...
  log('successfully returning myFunction');
  return someVariable;
}

and the console.log output is indeed: DEBUG bar.

The only way I can get it to work now is by doing:

import debug from 'debug';
const log = debug('bar');
log.enabled = true;

The moment I change const log = debug('bar'); back to const log = debug('foo'); , I get output messages for the foo namespace no matter what's in the DEBUG env var.

Any idea what might be happening here?

Dominant language
JavaScript
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