I would be okay with that and having them being noops in production, however, I'm not sure how we would distinguish between production and dev environments.
Actually, there is one way I can think of, which would be to leverage `A.log()`, which is suppressed in prod, but when the YUI configuration is passed with `{ filter: 'debug' }` it logs out to an in browser console (or the native console if configured).
We switch the configuration to debug when the `javascript.log.enabled=true` is set in the portal-ext.properties, so that could be one way to handle it (though the debug mode is also a little noisy depending on what you have the logLevel set to).
What we can do then is leave the messages in there, and use `A.log`, and if you ever need to enable debugging, you could easily place this at the top of your file: `A.applyConfig({filter: 'debug', useBrowserConsole: true, logInclude: { 'chat-video-portlet': true }});` (you can find more details on the log method here: http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/console/console-yui-config.html

Let me know if that makes sense (or it's possible you have a better idea for having the debugging only running during dev) :)