On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 05:14:31PM +0100, Mark Bergsma wrote:
Debug information is *highly useful* in a production setup, and we try to run all our core applications with it so we have a chance to debug issues when they occur.
I think the only reason distributions omit debug information is to save disk space.
A lot of Debian packages ship -dbg alongside the main package, that contains the stripped-out debug symbols in /usr/lib/debug (gdb loads those automatically, either based on the filename or build-id). The toolchain handles this more or less automatically, but it still needs maintainer action to define this separate package and upload it with every package upload.
Ubuntu has experimented in the past with the concept of automatically generating and shipping symbols for *all* packages, packaged up in a "ddeb"s (same format as .deb) and shipped via a different repository that isn't mirrored by all of the downstream mirrors.
This was years ago, I'm not sure what has happened since then. I remember being discussed in Debian as well, but it was never adopted, probably because noone ever implemented it :)
For MySQL/MariaDB, it seems that the Debian packages don't ship a -dbg package by default. That's a shame, we can ask for that. As for the rest of Asher's changes, I'd love to find a way to make stock packages work in our production setup, but I'm not sure if the maintainer would welcome the extra complexity of conditionally switching behaviors. We can try if you're willing to, Asher :)
Regards, Faidon