I wonder if we should add a "developer mode" to MacPorts -- something that developers could enable in macports.conf.
I feel that currently we print some information that is meant for developers and is not helpful to regular users -- such as the "reinplace didn't change anything" or "all compilers were blacklisted" warnings. And there is a lot more information that we could print that would be useful to developers but that we don't print because it would be overwhelming to regular users. We introduce new features, such as "compiler.cxx_standard 2011", meant to replace old methods like "PortGroup cxx11 1.1", yet we have no way of nudging developers to adopt these new features, short of the laborious process of manually searching out the ports and filing tickets or fixing it ourselves. If MacPorts could automatically nudge developers about these issues as they're updating their own ports, that could be helpful. In "developer mode", "port lint" or other checks could be run as part of every install. With this switch in place, over time, we could further streamline the regular non-developer user experience further, such as by reducing amount of (to the user probably irrelevant) output produced by installing or upgrading a port.
