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

[Andrew Chen]

On 9 April 2015 at 20:39, Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf at rocketmail.com> wrote:
> 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


Hi

Building QT and KDE from ABS is a huge pain (hours of compiling time, and qt4
won't even build without a clean chroot).

As people in FS#20921 have said, it would be useful if Arch Linux KDE users can
provide valuable feedback to the KDE community by having access to KDE debug
symbols for backtraces in crash reports.

Also, as far as I know, it doesn't take much more extra time to build debug
symbols (while building the the package), and providing debug symbols for
popular packages like KDE shouldn't take too much extra space.