DB_DataObject debugging - confused by production mode (newbie)

I'm having trouble making DB_DataObject's debug() methods work, and I'm confused by apparently conflicting documentation as to whether I'm in production mode: *http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.database.db-dataobject.db-dataobject.debug.php makes references to "the production setting in the configuration file" and "production mode". * http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.database.db-dataobject.intro-configuration.php doesn't contain the word "production" that I can find. *I don't see anything about production in my config.ini from which I'm loading DB_DataObject options. *grepping the source code for production finds a note in package.xml from 2003-03-06 that says, "- removed production option (not required due to improved config storage)" but I can't tell if this is relevant. *At line 3755 of DataObject.php I find this comment: // no checks for production here?....... DB_DataObject::debug($message,"ERROR",1); return $error; So it's not at all clear to me whether the production config option is live, and if so, how I would make sure it's not set. Of course other things could be going wrong too that I need to troubleshoot, but this seems to be a good place to start. TIA for answering this newbie's question. Cheers, Philip