Re: RFC --enable-debugging

[Brad Spencer <spencer at infointeractive dot com>]

On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 03:19:26PM -0600, B. Kosnik wrote:
> Man, this is a cool idea. I like this approach very much, and I think it
> resolves this issue nicely.

Thanks :)

I'm struggling to find good terminology for "library that is
debuggable" and "library with debugging symbols", because, as Gaby
pointed out, those are often two different things, and this is the
distinction we're trying to capture here.  

> It's of more general use than just libstdc++. Once we figure out what we
> want to do for libstdc++ perhaps we could do an RFC on the gcc list to
> see what other people think, and if it would be useful to other
> libraries as well.

I think using this to allow user-level debug library linking is a good
idea.  By asking for "debug libraries" (and not just "libraries with
debug symbols"), a user is asking for a sub-optimal build for the
purposes of tracking down a problem, so pulling in any found
user-level debug libraries is probably okay.

However, I think the ultimate extension of this idea would be
something like: 

  g++ --debug-libraries=c,stdc++,foo -o widget widget.o -lfoo -lbar

This would allow a user to specify for which libraries debugging
versions should be considered.  Here, libfoo, libc, and libstdc++
would have debugging versions used, while a non-debugging version of
libbar would be linked in.

Regardless, with some form of separate option, the user can select no
(extra) debugging support, just debugging symbols, or full-blown
special debug builds of their libraries.

-- 
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Brad Spencer - spencer@infointeractive.com - "It's quite nice..."
Systems Architect | InfoInterActive Corp. | A Canadian AOL Company