[arch-general] Why are there no debug packages?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 9 Apr 2015 20:07:29 +1200, Andrew Chen wrote:
>There has been many discussions and requests for separate debug symbol
>packages, even people offering to implement modifications needed for
>separate debug repos. But now, several years later, debug packages did
>not happen. I couldn't even find a definitive answer why there
>couldn't be debug packages in the official repos.
>So, why are there no debug packages (not even for the commonly
>requested ones like KDE and glibc)?
>
>Links:
>https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2013-April/024812.html
>https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/20921
>https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/10975

Hi, Andrew

what's wrong with building a debug package from ABS with
options=('!strip') on demand yourself? At least I very seldom need to
provide bug reports with gdb output. The few times I needed to do it
for a few packages, it wasn't an issue to build from ABS. For distros
that split packages in tons of insane packages for libs, headers and
bins it make sense to also provide debug packages, since users unlikely
have all the needed headers installed, but this isn't an issue for Arch
Linux. Spending effort and resources to provide debug packages IMO is
inefficient.

2 Cents,
Ralf