Source: developers-reference
Severity: normal
Tags: patch
As we now have Automatic Debug Symbol package, I think most of the
section could be deleted and replaced to the references on the Wiki.
The attached patch does that…
--
tobi
-- System Information:
Debian Release: buster/sid
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (1,
'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 4.17.0-3-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8),
LANGUAGE=en_US:en (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled
diff --git a/best-pkging-practices.dbk b/best-pkging-practices.dbk
index 6f05ece..6a85f23 100644
--- a/best-pkging-practices.dbk
+++ b/best-pkging-practices.dbk
@@ -1795,58 +1795,32 @@ it in its official location).
Best practices for debug packages
+
-A debug package is a package with a name ending in -dbg, that contains
-additional information that gdb can use. Since Debian
binaries are stripped by
-default, debugging information, including function names and line numbers, is
-otherwise not available when running gdb on Debian
binaries. Debug packages
-allow users who need this additional debugging information to install it,
-without bloating a regular system with the information.
-
-
-It is up to a package's maintainer whether to create a debug package or not.
-Maintainers are encouraged to create debug packages for library packages, since
-this can aid in debugging many programs linked to a library. In general, debug
-packages do not need to be added for all programs; doing so would bloat the
-archive. But if a maintainer finds that users often need a debugging version
-of a program, it can be worthwhile to make a debug package for it. Programs
-that are core infrastructure, such as Apache and the X server are also good
-candidates for debug packages.
-
-
-Some debug packages may contain an entire special debugging build of a library
-or other binary, but most of them can save space and build time by instead
-containing separated debugging symbols that gdb can find
and load on the fly
-when debugging a program or library. The convention in Debian is to keep these
-symbols in
/usr/lib/debug/path, where
-path is the path to the executable or library. For
-example, debugging symbols for /usr/bin/foo go in
-/usr/lib/debug/usr/bin/foo, and debugging symbols for
-/usr/lib/libfoo.so.1 go in
-/usr/lib/debug/usr/lib/libfoo.so.1.
-
-
-The debugging symbols can be extracted from an object file using
-objcopy --only-keep-debug. Then the object file can be
stripped,
-and objcopy --add-gnu-debuglink used to specify the path
-to the debugging symbol file.
- objcopy 1
- explains in detail how this works.
-
-
-The dh_strip command in debhelper supports creating debug
-packages, and can take care of using objcopy to separate
-out the debugging symbols for you. If your package uses debhelper, all you
-need to do is call dh_strip --dbg-package=libfoo-dbg, and
-add an entry to debian/control for the debug package.
+A debug package is a package that contains additional information that
+gdb can use. Since Debian binaries are stripped by
+default, debugging information, including function names and line
+numbers, is otherwise not available when running gdb
+on Debian binaries. Debug packages allow users who need this additional
+debugging information to install it, without bloating a regular system
+with the information.
+
-Note that the debug package should depend on the package that it provides
-debugging symbols for, and this dependency should be versioned. For example:
+Previously is was up to a package's maintainer whether to create a debug
+package or not. You can still find those manually generated debug
+packages, whose package names generally ended with -dbg.
+
+However, since end of 2015 manually generating dbg packages are
+depreciated and has been replaced largely by automatic debug symbol
+generation, which will generate packages with names ending with -dbgsym.
+
+If you want to migrate your legacy -dbg package, please read
+https://wiki.debian.org/AutomaticDebugPackages;> here ,
+if you want to use the dbgsym packages, you can find instructions
+https://wiki.debian.org/HowToGetABacktrace;> here .
+
-
-Depends: libfoo (= ${binary:Version})
-
Best practices for meta-packages
