Re: Debugging info unavailability

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Danny Milosavljevic <address@hidden> 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>.

The problem is that we’d have to add a line like:

  (outputs '("out"))

to all the packages that do not provide debugging symbols (such as
Perl/Python/Ruby packages), which could be a lot of them.  Or we could
provide:

  (define-syntax-rule (package/no-debug fields ...)
    (package
      (outputs '("out"))
      fields ...))

Thoughts?

Ludo’.