Why -g flag?

[jdg@maths.qmw.ac.uk (Julian Gilbey)]

Looking at the policy, section 4.1, it seems that Debian encourages
building packages with the -g comilation flag.  But although that
gives the advantage of debugging information where necessary, it makes
the binaries significantly bigger, sometimes very much so.  I'm not
clear on one point in the policy description: is this debugging
symbols version intended to be put in the version held by the
maintainer or the actually distributed version?  And if the latter,
surely this makes the packages potentially *much* larger, for
relatively little gain.  (How often do we get genuine bug reports
which need stack backtraces to solve which we are unable to reproduce
ourselves and need the user's stack trace?  Probably not sufficiently
often to justify requiring everyone to use code with all of the
debugging symbols.)

Looking forward to comments or interpretations of this paragraph of
policy.

Thanks,

   Julian

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  Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, QMW, Univ. of London. J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk
             Debian GNU/Linux Developer.  jdg@debian.org
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