Re: Bug#43787: changed title, and remade the proposed change

[Raul Miller <moth@debian.org>]

On Thu, Sep 09, 1999 at 02:19:36AM +0200, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> Raul, how hard do you want to make it for users to build with debugging
> info? Activating a gcc wrapper, changing install and strip. This is
> completely unreasonable.

I think I could build you a package which does this for you in a couple
hours.  However it would be a hack, and it might (or might not) be a
problem in an autobuilder environment that needed to support multiple
compilers -- depending on exactly how that environment was architected.

> Free Software works because people can contribute in finding and
> resolving bug reports. It is important that people can easily provide
> backtraces from gdb and similar. The harder we make it for our users
> to contribute, the less contribution we will get.
>
> Indeed, I would prefer we had a way to provide a Debian system with
> full debugging symbols included. I hope this is possible some day. But
> this is not achievable currently, I know. Still, I think we should at
> least try.

Ok.  If we want to have this as a goal then yeah: Ben's proposal doesn't
meet this goal.

> I hpoe my point is now more clear.

I think so:

To achieve this goal, you really want two things to happen:

(1) You want a way to guarantee that elf executables are built with
debugging symbols.  [Depreciating the current possibility that they
wouldn't be.]

(2) You want some way to prevent the executables from being stripped
before they're installed on the target system.  [Depreciating the current
unconditional stripping of debugging symbols from packages.]

Since Ben's proposal only touches on compilation -- not package building
or installation -- you're only addressing (1) at the moment.

Do I have this correct?

[And, do you think there'd be a problem waiting on (1) until (2) is
being addressed?]

-- 
Raul