[Freewx-maint] Bug#655251: wxwidgets2.8: debug packages are useless to gdb

[Yann Dirson]

On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 03:35:27PM +1300, Olly Betts wrote:
> severity 655251 wishlist
> thanks
> 
> On Mon, Jan 09, 2012 at 09:51:21PM +0100, Yann Dirson wrote:
> > With both -dbg packages installed, gdb still cannot provide any
> > sourceline information in backtraces.
> > 
> > Looks like for some reason the provided files are shipped in
> > /usr/lib/$ARCH with special names, instead of /usr/lib/$ARCH/debug
> > with the original name.  Symlinking them from /usr/lib/$ARCH/debug
> > does not appear to work, though.
> > 
> > How are those packages supposed to be used at all ?  The lone
> > decade-old /usr/share/doc/libwxbase2.8-0/README.Debian makes me
> > suspicious it has nothing to do with the modern infrastructure in
> > /usr/lib/debug.
> 
> The package description seems fairly clear to me:
> 
>  This package provides a debug version of the wxGTK library.  It is compiled
>  both with -g for normal debugger tracing and with the __WXDEBUG__ flag which
>  provides many internal checks by wxWidgets itself that are not performed on
>  apps compiled with the 'release version' libs in the -dev package.
> 
> So these -dbg packages aren't detached debug symbols as is typical for
> packages so named.  Ron and I talked about this a few months ago and
> concluded that it would be less confusing to rename them to something else,
> but that it was probably not worth the disruption it would cause to do so
> for wx2.8, so the intention is to make this change in wx2.9/3.0 instead.
> 
> As far as I can see, policy doesn't say that packages named -dbg have to
> contain detached debug symbols, nor that library packages have to provide
> detached debug symbols, so I'm setting the severity appropriately.

Fair enough, this is more of an "old-style" -dbg package.  But this
seems to mean there is no way of providing a proper backtrace when
reporting a crash of a wx app, right ?  See eg. Bug#655280.