Debug log for updates not removed after RC 1

[webzunft]

I found the debug.log of some of my sites flooded with entries like this:

Automatic theme updates starting...
Automatic theme updates complete.

On further investigation, I saw that this comes from core and was added in https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/58281

If I understand this ticket correctly, the error log code should have been removed after RC1, though they weren’t.

[hellofromTonya]

Hello @webzunft,

Welcome back to WordPress Core Trac. Thank you for opening this ticket to learn more about this are of code and why / when these messages are logged.

As you noted, these messages are in your debug.log file. This particular log file is generated when the site is in debug mode. In debug mode, these messages are intentional (by design as of [58139]) with the purpose to log these events to help contributors, support folks, developers, users, etc with debugging tasks.

When do they appear? When the site is in a debug state, meaning the site's WP_DEBUG and WP_DEBUG_LOG constants are both true (see code):

$is_debug = WP_DEBUG && WP_DEBUG_LOG;

By default (which includes a live production site), these debug constants are not enabled and thus, these upgrade / update messages are not logged.

Does that make sense?

As it's by design, closing this ticket as wontfix.

[webzunft]

Thanks @hellofromTonya!

Thanks for taking the time to reply to my ticket!

I am aware of the debug features in WordPress.
If I wouldn’t enable WP_DEBUG_LOG on a few sites, I would not catch many errors that some plugins are throwing. Over the years, my reports helped a lot of them to improve their code.

This is the first time I remember that WordPress core itself massively wrote into the debug.log. I understand the purpose now, but hope it will change in the near future.

Thanks,
Thomas