Re: Bug#43787: changed title, and remade the proposed change

[Marcus Brinkmann <Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de>]

On Thu, Sep 09, 1999 at 11:20:48AM -0400, Ben Collins wrote:
> "You have to implement debugging this way if you are going to
> support it". Two reasons:
> 
> 1) Right now policy does not require -g, but only suggests an
>    example, yet everyone is compilg this way. I don't think our
>    developers have to be forced into every possible detail of
>    packaging. Who knows, with the option to do it differently,
>    some one may find a better way. Also, with a suggest, you can
>    always file a wishlist bug to the affect if you want. So they
>    can support either form (their own and the suggested one in
>    policy).

Your proposal was concerned about autobuilders. It would be great to have an
autobuuilder someday which produces packages with debugging symbols. Only a
common interface can make this possible.

>    The main point being, that most developers _want_ to be standard
>    and will not want to go the extra mile of implementing something
>    completely different than policy suggests that wont get used.

Then we can make it mandatory just as well.

> 2) Perhaps there is no way for that maintainers package to comply
>    exactly with the details of the requirement.

Erm. _If_ you can support building with debugging information, you can
make it possible to activate it with parsing DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS.
How can this ever be not true? You can't think of an example because there
is non. Probalby you are misunderstanding what my preferred requirements
would be.

>    Also there may be different cases of what debugging actually is in
>    a package. Perhaps it is a set of scripts, that when generated normally
>    strips out some of the debug code, but can also be generated with the
>    debug code. We don't know, so we can't force this.

You are missing my point. My concerns are only about the interface, not
under which circumstances the support should be implemented (we all want it
to happen in as many cases as possible), and not about the way it is
implemented (CFLAGS=-g, or whatever).
 
> This proposal has clear advantages (as others have admitted)

In my eyes, it has not an advantage, but disadvantages. First, we will
probably get less support for building with debugging info because it is not
the default anymore and adding the interface is not encouraged anymore. This
will give a small compile time increase at the cost of making it harder for
users to get packages with debug information.

I wthdraw my second. I don't object to your proposal, although I find it
suboptimal at least. Instead, I'll probably raise another proposal somewhat
later. Obviously, in the current atmosphere here I can't get my point
across.

> Fortunately, this one will
> atleast be able to back out easily because it is non-obtrusive to how we currently
> do things (we still get stripped packages without changes).

Oh how great. This is really a great proposal of you, that accomplishes such
a difficult goal.

Marcus

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