On 30/05/12 14:14, Russell Coker wrote:
On Wed, 30 May 2012, James Harper<james.harper@bendigoit.com.au> wrote:
If done properly, the dbg builds would have various compiler optimisations turned off too. Under Windows, a debug ('checked') build includes all the ASSERTS and DebugPrint messages too which are stripped out in the 'free' build.
Yes compiler optimisation often makes debugging difficult. Compilers are free to optimise out arithmetic and logical steps.
But even knowing approximately which line of the function had the error can really help.
Only if you're a developer for that distribution. Everyone else will either be: An end-user - in which case they'll hit "restart" and continue, and possibly complain a bit in a forum somewhere. An upstream developer - in which case they'll already be compiling it from source and have debug symbols if desired. According to one page I found, there are 2916 Debian developers, total. So, by adding debug symbols to everything, you'd be helping out at most 3000 people, and inconveniencing many, many more. And those developers could just install the -dbg packages if they really want.. -Toby PS. Am not sure if the figure is accurate; is debian.org/devel/people a reasonable indicator?