Re: packages with broken debuginfo

[Roland McGrath <roland redhat com>]

> It seems to me that the way this *should* work is:
> 
>  - The main libs package contains the debug symbols, not stripped
>    (separate debug symbols aren't going to work for a static library,
>    as far as I can see.)

They definitely cannot work as things stand.

>  - The debuginfo package contains the sources, as per-normal
> 
> Of course, that's probably a lot of work. 

Not necessarily.  There's a of magic that's done to create debuginfo
packages beyond just using eu-strip -g -f.  There is also
/usr/lib/rpm/debugedit, which normalizes the file names in the debugging
information to /usr/src/debug names, and along the way collects the list of
source files that need to go in the debuginfo rpm.  debugedit could be
pretty easily extended to handle .a libraries, and run on the unstripped
libfoo.a to fix up their source file names and collect the list.

> Really, of course, the answer is to avoid static libraries. This is 
> just the tip of the iceberg for problems with static libraries. 
> They don't work across libc version changes, for another example.

Indeed they are in general not really supported.  But on rare occasions
they are unavoidable, and it would be ideal to have nice debuginfo for
programs that are statically linked against installed libraries.