Looking at the policy, section 4.1, it seems that Debian encourages building packages with the -g comilation flag. But although that gives the advantage of debugging information where necessary, it makes the binaries significantly bigger, sometimes very much so. I'm not clear on one point in the policy description: is this debugging symbols version intended to be put in the version held by the maintainer or the actually distributed version? And if the latter, surely this makes the packages potentially *much* larger, for relatively little gain. (How often do we get genuine bug reports which need stack backtraces to solve which we are unable to reproduce ourselves and need the user's stack trace? Probably not sufficiently often to justify requiring everyone to use code with all of the debugging symbols.)
Looking forward to comments or interpretations of this paragraph of policy. Thanks, Julian =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, QMW, Univ. of London. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Debian GNU/Linux Developer. [EMAIL PROTECTED] -*- Finger [EMAIL PROTECTED] for my PGP public key. -*-