Re: -dbg packages; are they actually useful?
Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com> writes:
> 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?
They've been vital for me several times with library packages and I've
occasionally cursed libraries that didn't have them. I find them much
less interesting for applications (and indeed dropped them from one
application package that I took over after it was orphaned).
There are some exceptions, though; for example, I ship debug symbols for
the OpenAFS fileserver since it's often hard to figure out what's going on
without a backtrace and upstream is very active and very good about
analyzing those backtraces. I similarly think it's important to provide
debugging symbols for slapd.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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