Let's talk about +debug

[Blair Zajac]

On 04/19/2012 11:28 AM, Daniel J. Luke wrote:
> On Apr 19, 2012, at 2:21 PM, Blair Zajac wrote:
>> On 04/19/2012 10:16 AM, Joshua Root wrote:
>>> On 2012-4-20 02:40 , Sean Farley wrote:
>>>> I'd like to discuss /review the latest patch here:
>>>>
>>>> https://trac.macports.org/ticket/33821
>>>>
>>>> As I point out in the ticket, it is extremely useful to retain
>>>> debugging symbols for libraries (optionally set with +debug). My
>>>> co-workers and I have been using this for about two years now with no
>>>> problems whatsoever and we'd like to see it in the core of macports.
>>>> Thoughts?
>>>
>>> I don't doubt this is useful to you, but I really don't want to have to
>>> support it. It's inevitably not going to work right in some cases, and
>>> when you provide a variant people understandably expect it to work. The
>>> target audience is also comparatively small.
>>>
>>> At this point I'd probably rather not accept it at all, and just let you
>>> continue to provide it as a third party patch. If we did decide to
>>> include it, I'd at least want it off by default with a config knob for
>>> those who know they need it.
>>
>> When you're debugging something, having debugging symbols available in the package management system is very handy, so I'm +1 for having this feature.
>
>
> It doesn't make sense to me as a base feature, though.

Sure it does, many other distro's provide debugging support.  On my 
Ubuntu 11.10 system, there's this number of packages with debugging symbols:

$ apt-cache search -- -dbg| wc -l
1570

On our Fedora systems, anytime we build an RPM with rpmbuild, I get an 
additional foo-debuginfo package with debugging symbols.

> Maybe as a portgroup? You can (pretty) easily add it to any portfile you care about, and it's obvious that you are doing something wonky/unsupported.

This isn't wonky or unsupported.

> The vast majority of people using MacPorts don't care about debugging symbols (and aren't going to experience any benefit from them) - adding an automatic variant that may or may not work to every port seems like overkill.

You don't know that until you want or need them.  Any many times you 
won't hear people complain about not having them, but having them 
available is very handy.  I didn't complain to Fedora years about not 
having them.

Maybe we should ask on the users mailing list.

Blair