Re: Mandatory -dbg packages for libraries?
On Mon, Apr 23, 2007 at 03:08:41PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> > Yes, it's deliberate. People rarely need them just because they're
> > debugging something linked to libc.so.6. Having them slows down GDB
> > startup and increases its memory usage, for _every_ debug session.
>
> Ok. Of course, this is also generally an argument against having -dbg
> packages for libraries with separated symbols..
Yes. It's a tradeoff question. Pretty much any other library will
affect a smaller overall percentage of users :-)
> > You'll notice if you look closely that libc6-dbg contains two things.
> > One of them is a set of libraries you can use if you want to debug
> > libc6. The other is a set of separate symbol files, but they contain
> > only frame unwind information, no symbolic or line number information.
> > This keeps the size and performance impact of the package down, but
> > makes backtraces out of libc6 hugely more reliable.
>
> What are your feelings on only including the -g1 information in library
> -dbg packages in general? It does save a lot of space, but the potential
> utility also goes way down.
I don't remember exactly what -g1 produces, but I think libc6-dbg is
even less - it's only .debug_frame and .symtab, nothing else at all.
I think libc6-dbg is a special case here, and we should use -g (-g2)
in general. Another possible way to change glibc would be to have
libc6-dbg contain full debug symbols, libc6-dev contain -g1 symbols
only, and have the -dbg divert the -dev.
--
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery
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