[Fedora-packaging] Importance of debuginfo packages

[Jason L Tibbitts III]

Often when doing package reviews I find a package that needs some hack
in order to get rpmbuild to build a complete debuginfo package.  Some
of this relates to passing the proper compiler flags and making sure
the package doesn't strip its own binaries, which I think is
necessary, but occasionally rpmbuild needs the source to be moved
around in the build tree, or it needs symlinks flattened or somesuch.

These are just hacks to work around rpmbuild deficiencies, and I can
understand if packagers are reticent to clutter up their packages for
something of unknown value.  So, how important is it to have a proper
debuginfo package?  How much hacking is permissible or necessary in
order to achieve that goal?  Is an incomplete debuginfo package (that
contains, say, the striped debug information but is missing some or
all of the source code) still useful, or would it be better to have
none at all?

 - J<