Building Yocto and specifying a layer to be a debug build, everything else release

Question

I have a project where I need only layer to be a debug build. I went to the meta/conf/layer.conf file, adding the following lines:

INHIBIT_PACKAGE_DEBUG_SPLIT = "1"

INHIBIT_PACKAGE_STRIP = "1"

DEBUG_BUILD = "1"

EXTRA_IMAGE_FEATURES_append = " dbg-pkgs"

This resulted in all layers to be a debug build.

How do I specify a single layer?