> From: Torsten Landschoff > > Really? Then I have to adjust my idea of -dbg library packages. > I thought they only contain symbolic names for everything to allow > you to trace where inside the lib your program crashes.
That was an heritage of proprietary libraries, where this was the _only_ debug you could do on it. You obviously can use a -dbg package to do also this, but it is not limited to this use. > > libc6-dbg does not have the library source. Could somebody enlight me a bit? > :-) There were several discussions about this on debian-policy, and discussion didn't came to a conclusion (so nothing was mandated, but nothing was forbitten). Later I hadn't time to restart it. At that time libc was semi-orphaned and changed hands a couple of times. Maybe the new maintainer ... But anyway, the idea that I should grab the sources and rebuild a library is not a good offer for a system that pretends to be mainly dedicated to development. Having full functionality -dbg packages doesn't hurt those that wants simply to trace their programs, while the contrary can hurt a lot. I had a problem with man crashing on circular links (it should still be there), and I had to buy a new disk to rebuild libc6 to run gdb on it and find the exact line of code where the bug was. I would have really appreciated a full functional -dbg package (maybe split in two or more parts, because of the size) that would offer me instant debugging. fab
