Debugging information in MinGW packages

Alexey Pushkin alexey.pushkin at mererand.com
Wed Feb 25 14:04:35 UTC 2009


Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 02:46:39PM +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> what's the correct way to handle debugging information in MinGW packages?
>>
>> Currently, mingw32-nsis builds everything with debugging information (due to
>> the debian-debug-opt patch), even the MinGW parts, but the MinGW debugging
>> information is not extracted, so it's included within the binaries. This is
>> particularly annoying for NSIS installers as it bloats the installer stubs.
>> For example, the lzma_solid stub is 210185 bytes, running a MinGW strip on
>> it reduces it to 55296 bytes.
>>
>> Do we really want debugging information in the MinGW stuff even if it can't
>> be extracted into separate -debuginfo? Or should the MinGW portions of NSIS
>> be built without -g instead? Should the same policy apply to everything or
>> should NSIS be special? (I can see why a developer would want to have
>> debugging information for a library, but for an installer?)
> 
> Last time we tried, a cross compiled GDB crashed & burned. So unless someone
> can demonstrate a usuable WINE/Win32 debugger that can use the gcc generated
> debugging info, then we should not build with -g, nor create -debuginfo 
> sub-RPMs.

This build of GDB
https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=202880&package_id=259447
works with executables compiled with Mingw-w64.


> 
> The exception being the base toolchain that is natively compiled should of
> course have debuginfo as normal.
> 
> Daniel




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