[arch-general] debug package repositories again

[Leonid Isaev]

On Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 10:09:00AM -0700, Joe Julian wrote:
> >>Bandwidth is probably the main problem, although anyone who wants to debug
> >>will probably be fine with that.
> >I think you guys misunderstood me. The biggest problem IMHO with building debug
> >versions locally is not compiling itself, but setting up the environment. So, I
> >meant that packages come with debugging enabled (compiled with gcc -O0 -g and
> >perhaps ./configure options). This way, there will be not many new packages.
> 
> No, the biggest problem with building debug versions locally is that it
> takes hours of developer time multiplied by every bug found. Why are we
> wasting such a limited resource when it's so easy not to? Life is finite.

That's just pure theory. In practice, the compilation itself is a minor
inconvenience, unless you are talking about Gnome/KDE. But debugging those is
hopeless anyway :)

As a developer, you'll spend most time understanding the changes (looking at
the code), not compiling.

> >Of course, this is not a good idea for things like FF/Gnome/KDE because of a
> >slow-down, but a performance penalty for smaller programs like vim, links,
> >XFCE4 etc. will not be noticeable (at least I don't see any for a self-compiled
> >xfce4 desktop on a single-core Intel Atom based netbook).
> >
> >Cheers,
> 
> What is this slow-down you keep talking about? I'm not asking to do away
> with optimization, just give us a way to get the debug symbols without
> rebuilding. The debug symbols are located in totally different sections from
> the code/data sections. You can check it with objdump:

I was under the impression that with C, -On (n > 0) is not recommended with -g.
Now, I don't know how much -O2 (for example) speeds things up compared to -O1
etc, but probably not much on small applications.

Granted, I think any compiler-level optimization is overrated, and I never
really saw any measurable effect of it. But I use Fortran (not C) for all my
projects.

Cheers,
-- 
Leonid Isaev
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