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

[Olly Betts]

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.

Cheers,
    Olly