Bug#299578: lintian: check that -dbg packages are using separate debugging info

[Matt Taggart <taggart@debian.org>]

Package: lintian
Version: 1.23.8
Severity: wishlist

binutils and gdb now have support for putting debugging info into a separate 
file. So you build things debugable and you get a separate file with all the 
debugging info and a normal binary that contains a pointer to this info. This 
is really cool because now we don't need to have two copies of ever binary we 
want debugable, just the normal package and then the debugging add on. I guess 
dh_strip now has support for doing this by default when generating -dbg 
packages.

I would like to see linitian check binaries of packages that support 
debugging. As this is not yet policy it would just be a warning I guess.

My guess at implementing:
For packages that support debugging (I think lintian already determines this 
somehow right?), check each binary for the pointer to the separate debug info 
and printing a warning if not present. I think the check for support can be 
accomplished with,

  objdump  -h $FILE |grep .gnu_debuglink

What do you think?

Thanks,

-- 
Matt Taggart
taggart@debian.org