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Re: NDEBUG when building packages?




Mathieu Malaterre <malat@debian.org> wrote:

>On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 5:30 PM, Ian Jackson
><ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
>> Daniel Pocock writes ("NDEBUG when building packages?"):
>>> I notice some upstreams hack NDEBUG into their Makefile, while
>others
>>> leave it at the discretion of the user
>>>
>>> Is there any distribution policy for this?  Should I be adding
>something
>>> into debian/rules to set -DNDEBUG when I prepare a package for
>release?
>>
>> -DNDEBUG is (normally) EBW.
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBW ?

My understanding is that he means

Evil
Bad
Wrong

Some people argue that assert itself is just as bad

>
>> Unless your packages are weird in some way, you shouldn't set it.
>> Even if upstream specify it it can be right to remove it.
>
>In that case, this should really be clarified. A lot of debian/cmake
>packages are actually doing:
>
>-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE:STRING=Release
>
>within there debian/rules files. This settings by default compiles
>with: `-O3 -DNDEBUG`
>

Changing this would, in the short term, cause many new crashes to be observed.

In the long term, the feedback about such issues (assuming the assert stderr output is captured by the users and reported upstream) could lead to an improvement in quality and the resolution/prevention of more obscure issues.

+1 to ban NDEBUG in jessie





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