Re: Automatic debug symbol generation

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello,

* JRS wrote on Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 07:02:55AM CEST:
> I was setting up build infrastructure once again when it occurred to
> me, hmm, wouldn't it be nice if automake had default targets for
> installing symbols?
> 
> For example, make install-syms could do objcopy --only-keep-debug on
> the binaries and libraries, and put the .debug files in
> /usr/lib/debug.

What's the advantage over just installing binaries into $(bindir)
without stripping them?  Non-brain-damaged systems won't load them from
the file anyway for normal execution.

Also, objcopy is not portable to anything that doesn't have GNU
binutils.

> It looks like implementing this is as simple as just patching libs.am
> and progs.am, but I have no clue what automake's regression testing
> strategy is.  Is there another developer set up and sufficiently
> convinced this is a feature worth implementing?

I'm not yet convinced.  ;-)

> If not, how do I get
> started building a dev environment for automake?

Just get the git tree here:

  git clone git://git.sv.gnu.org/automake.git
  cd automake
  ./bootstrap

and then get hacking.  README, tests/README contain information about
testing, the HACKING file contains information on what is requires for
patches to be applicable.  And yes, we'd prefer full test exposure for
all new features.

Note that we need FSF copyright assignments for all nontrivial patches
(more on this off-list if you're interested).

Cheers,
Ralf