Re: -dbg packages; are they actually useful?

[Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Tue, Mar 03, 2009 at 10:12:22PM +0000, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> 
> I'm looking at my local mirror (slowly) update at the moment, and I've
> got to wondering: are the large -dbg packages actually really useful
> to anybody? I can't imagine that more than a handful of users ever
> install (to pick an example) the amarok-dbg packages, but we have
> multiple copies of a 70MB-plus .deb taking up mirror space and
> bandwidth. I can understand this for library packages, maybe, but for
> applications?

There are people working on ways of compressing the debuginfo
information, and I've been told they might have results within a
couple of months.  Part of the problem is that depending on how the
package is built, the -dbg packages can be huge, so it makes the
cost/benefit ratio somewhat painful.

If the -dbg files were more like these sizes:

224 e2fslibs-dbg_1.41.3-1_i386.deb     52 libss2-dbg_1.41.3-1_i386.deb
452 e2fsprogs-dbg_1.41.3-1_i386.deb    48 libuuid1-dbg_1.41.3-1_i386.deb
 76 libblkid1-dbg_1.41.3-1_i386.deb    48 uuid-runtime-dbg_1.41.3-1_i386.deb
 44 libcomerr2-dbg_1.41.3-1_i386.deb

I doubt there's be too much concern....

  		       	    	    	  	- Ted