This ought to work, right? From a fresh 3.0 install from tarball on Debian Buster: $ guile GNU Guile 3.0.0 Copyright (C) 1995-2020 Free Software Foundation, Inc. Guile comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `,show w'. This program is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions; type `,show c' for details. Enter `,help' for help. scheme@(guile-user)> (debug-enable 'debug) ice-9/boot-9.scm:1669:16: In procedure raise-exception: In procedure debug-options-interface: Unknown option name: debug Entering a new prompt. Type `,bt' for a backtrace or `,q' to continue. scheme@(guile-user) [1]> ,bt In ice-9/boot-9.scm: 3609:0 2 (debug-enable . _) In unknown file: 1 (debug-options-interface (debug show-file-name #t # # …)) In ice-9/boot-9.scm: 1669:16 0 (raise-exception _ #:continuable? _) scheme@(guile-user) [1]>