Re: Debugging info unavailability

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Maxim Cournoyer <maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com> skribis:

> ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Danny Milosavljevic <dannym@scratchpost.org> skribis:
>>
>>> just now I had to debug a doxygen Segmentation Fault.  I tried to install doxygen:debug but that wasn't available.
>>>
>>> I think it would be nice if these outputs were available by default (but not installed by default).
>>
>> Yeah, on of the reasons this is currently opt-in is disk space on hydra,
>> as noted in the manual (info "(guix) Installing Debugging Files").
>>
>> There’s also the fact that packages that do not use the GNU build system
>> will most likely not produce debugging info out of the box, so adding
>> “debug” automatically may break many packages.
>>
>>> If we wanted to do that, we could just adapt
>>> guix/build-system/cmake.scm, guix/build-system/gnu.scm and
>>> guix/build-system/glib-or-gtk.scm outputs default to say '("out"
>>> "debug") instead of '("out").
>>
>> Rather we should change the default value of the ‘outputs’ field of
>> <package>.
>>
>
> Adding the "debug" to the default value of <package> would every package
> to now have a debug output; isn't this why Danny suggested to only
> change it at the build system level? That way nothing which doesn't have
> debugging symbols by default would break or have a useless debug output.

Yes, it’s tempting to do it at the build-system level.  However, there
would now be a discrepancy between the actual outputs of the package
derivations and those of the package object: the package object would
declare just one output, but the corresponding derivation would have two
outputs.

I guess bad things would happen if we did that, but maybe someone needs
to try and see exactly what goes wrong.

Ludo’.