Package: developers-reference
Version: 3.3.8
Severity: normal
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Debug packages
A debug package is a package with a name ending in "-dbg", that contains
additional information that gdb can use. Since Debian binaries are
stripped by default, debugging information, including function names and
line numbersm is not available when running gdb on Debian binaries. Debug
packages allow users who need this additional debugging information to
install it, without bloating a regular system with the information.
It is up to a package's maintainer whether to create a debug package or
not. Maintainers are encouraged to create debug packages for library
packages, since this can aid in debugging many programs linked to a
library. In general, debug packages do not need to be added for all
programs; doing so would bloat the archive. But if a maintainer finds
that users often need a debugging version of a program, it can be
worthwhile to make a debug package for it. Programs that are core
infrastructure, such as apache and the X server are also good candidates
for debug packages.
Some debug packages may contain an entire special debugging build of a
library or other binary, but most of them can save space and build time
by instead containing separated debugging symbols that gdb can find and
load on the fly when debugging a program or library. The convention in
Debian is to keep these symbols in /usr/lib/debug/<path>, where <path>
is the path to the executable or library. For example, debugging symbols
for /usr/bin/foo go in /usr/lib/debug/usr/bin/foo, and debugging symbols
for /usr/lib/libfoo.so.1 go in /usr/lib/debug/usr/lib/libfoo.so.1 .
The debugging symbols can be extracted from an object file using
"objcopy --only-keep-debug". Then the object file can be stripped, and
"objcopy --add-gnu-debuglink" used to specify the path to the debugging
symbol file. The man page for objcopy(1) explains in detail how this
works.
The dh_strip command in debhelper supports creating debug packages, and
can take care of using objcopy to separate out the debugging symbols for
you. If your package uses debhelper, all you need to do is call
"dh_strip --dbg-package=libfoo-dbg", and add an entry to debian/control
for the debug package.
Note that the Debian package should depend on the package that it
provides debugging symbols for, and this dependency should be versioned.
For example:
Depends: libfoo-dbg (= ${binary:Version})
-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.20-1-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
developers-reference depends on no packages.
Versions of packages developers-reference recommends:
ii debian-policy 3.7.2.2 Debian Policy Manual and related d
-- no debconf information
--
see shy jo
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