How can I make wpa_supplicant more verbose?

[Glenn Ammons]

I am having trouble connecting to my father's wireless network and
would like wpa_supplicant to give me more information in syslog.
What's the best way to accomplish this?  I don't really know how
wpa_supplicant is invoked; the setup in /etc is pretty dizzying.  I
did find that an environment variable named IF_WPA_DEBUG_LEVEL is read
by /etc/wpa_supplicant/functions.sh and seems to make logging more
verbose.  However, I can't figure out where I should set that
variable.  I suppose that I could just edit
/etc/wpa_supplicant/functions.sh, but that seems pretty brainless.

This is on Ubuntu 11.04, by the way.

Thanks.
--glenn