Debug through logger's debug function

Pardon me if this has already been answered. I know “debug” is not a logger and I respect that. I do not want to log with debug, I’d like debug to output in my logs instead. 😃 Specifically I’d like all third party modules using the ubiquitous “debug” to log through Winston’s debug function. It’s a matter of consistency turning log levels on/off dynamically. Is it possible?

I’ve tried to leverage node’s module caching in this way:

var Debug = require('debug');
var Logger = require('winston');
Debug.log = Logger.debug;

var mod = require('module_using_debug');

It’s not working… 😦

[bragma]

After using it for a while, I’d say it’s not a perfect solution. It has at least 2 problems:

1. Due to the way caching works, you have no guarantee that 3rd party modules will use the winston/debug instance you configured. If they don’t, the solution won’t work. Since even a minor version change is a different instance of a module, it does not work very often.
2. For this solution to work, you have to enable all debug messages, then rely on Winston to disable/enable logging. This for sure has an overhead, since debug does not know about this “trick” and will format and emit all messages, Winston has to do some processing on them and finally ignore them. Considering that debug is often used for tracing code, it may be a lot of messages being uselessly processed and then thrown away.

[rbriank]

Did this happen? Having trouble finding it anywhere in the docs for 3.1