Thanks for your prompt answer.
In my case, I don't really want to debug gcc, but I want to make an upstream bug report as precise as possible. So including a stack trace would be a bonus. It should help narrowing the nature of the bug, so that the appriopriate upstream author can start investigating, thus saving them time.yes, space & bandwidth. the packages get 100%-200% bigger. and if you really want to debug gcc, you need the source and you build it yourself. gcc-snapshot is intended to check for bugs in development versions of gcc, such that package maintainers can have it installed on different architectures.
True, I could rebuild gcc from source for this, but I know from experience that it's quite time consuming to find out exactly what sources are needed, and to do the compilation itself, to the point where it does not seem worth it just to include a stack trace.
So I understand it's a trade-off between the size of the package and the service done to users and gcc upstream authors, who could get better quality reports. Maybe a compromise would be to mention in README.Debian how to rebuild from the source package, and which flags to pass to get a fully debug-enabled build. That would save some research time.
Cheers, Daniel