Two questions on ipa files.
My environment Xcode 4.6 and iOS 5 & 6.
About the first question, yes, you can archive an app in Debug mode. From Xcode, browse the Product menu, Scheme, Manage Schemes, Edit. Select the Archive action on the left pane and choose Debug as Build Configuration in the drop down box.
If you want to restrict logging only to Debug configurations, you can add this to your ProjectName-Prefix.pch
file:
#ifdef DEBUG
#define XYZLog(format, ...) NSLog(format, ## __VA_ARGS__)
#else
#define XYZLog(format, ...)
#endif
Where "XYZ" is the three letter prefix for your application (Cocoa naming convention).
Then you must use XYZLog
instead of NSLog
in your code and the output will only go to the console for Debug versions.