Debug symbols in packages, what's the policy?

[Reinhard Tartler]

On Sun, Sep 9, 2012 at 1:05 PM, Kaj Ailomaa <zequence at mousike.me> wrote:
> I had someone asking about this on a Ubuntu Studio IRC channel, and myself
> being ignorant on the subject, I got help from the same person on collecting
> some info on debugging symbols being built in into debian multimedia
> packages, and also searched the web a bit to see what I could find.
>
> As he suggested, some packages, such as qtractor, have build flags for
> including debug symbols in the rules file.
>
> And what I found while searching the web was that this may be the preferred
> way to build debian multimedia packages -
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=684035.
>
> So, my question is, is there a policy for including debug symbols with
> debian multimedia packages, and why?

We generally follow the recommendation of the Debian Developer's Reference:
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/best-pkging-practices.html#bpp-dbg
>
> If so, why not split those into additional packages?

That link above mandates to split debug symbols into separate packages
ending on -dbg. This is also what we do in pkg-multimedia.

The catch is that not all packages do ship -dbg packages. The general
rule is that if someone feels they would be helpful, then he adds the
appropriate rules to produce the -dbg package.

Note that in Ubuntu, the creation of -dbg packages is unnecessary,
because the launchpad infrastructure automatically produces so-called
.ddeb packages and publishes them at http://ddebs.ubuntu.com/. See
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingProgramCrash for Ubuntu specific
instructions, and compare them to
http://wiki.debian.org/HowToGetABacktrace


-- 
regards,
    Reinhard