possible to enable debug symbols by default?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On May 31, 2018, at 21:42, Eitan Adler wrote:
> On 31 May 2018 at 19:40, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>> Or: A setting in macports.conf that makes MacPorts base add -g for all ports? That would cause the built result to be different. We could offer that, but would have to also make sure that MacPorts doesn't attempt to download any binaries from our packages servers, since they would not have been built with that setting.
> 
> This one. Personally I'd be fine with "best effort" and fallback to
> packages, but I imagine some would not be.

That's not how MacPorts works.

When you ask MacPorts to install a port, it tries to get a binary package. If that fails, it tries to build from source.

If we introduce a new macports.conf setting that lets you enable debug symbols, and that setting is not on by default, then that setting will not be on on our buildbot workers which produce the binary packages. So if you get a binary package, you will not get debug symbols, even if that setting is on on your system. You will only get debug symbols if the port, for whatever reason, builds from source on your system. That would be confusing. Therefore, so that you get consistent behavior, if we introduce such a new setting, it must also prevent all use of binary packages.