Let's talk about +debug

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Apr 19, 2012, at 2:50 PM, Blair Zajac wrote:
>> 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:

we're not like other distros ;-)

>> 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.

but it should be - adding that variant to every port makes it (like +universal) something that we then have to support for every port (or explicitly turn off for ports where it doesn't work).

While it might work for most things, I'm sure there are ports where it won't work to build debug versions (so they'll all need special attention).

Additionally, every extra variant makes things harder to test.

>> 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.  

Most of our end-users aren't developers, don't use gdb, don't understand what a backtrace is, and aren't going to benefit from having +debug available on 'all' ports.

--
Daniel J. Luke                                                                   
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