Does anyone have any suggestions for how to compile a debian package, specifically apt, for debugging? I got curious about some odd apt-get behavior (posted here previously) and wanted to try to track it down. Easier said than done!
I think the problem is that I'm linking with my main libapt-pkg.so, which doesn't have any debug info. I have tried setting -ggdb in appropriate places and turning on static linking, but it doesn't seem to have taken (judging from what happens in debug and the output of ldd). I may be missing some general feature of GNU or debian packages, or it may be peculiar to apt. apt has a somewhat non-standard build architecture in place. I did apt-get source and then ./configure, make at the top level (the build tree, or a good part of it, is replicated in debian/cvs-build--I'm not messing with that). I'm not trying to build a deb, and my output files are ending up under the source tree (which is fine). I've steadily modified the build files, first with -ggdb and then with static makes. I've done make cleans in between. Aside from apt, I'd like to know if there are some general knobs for turning debugging on with most packages. P.S. I would have posted this to the deity (aka apt) list, but it is apparently limited to apt developers. I'm not one, though conceivably I might have a patch at the end of this to get apt to explain itself better. I have turned on the documented Debug conf file options.