Re: [Bug-wget] Debug symbols

[Hrvoje Niksic]

Code for --disable-debug is very old.  From what I remember...

Jeff Janes <address@hidden> writes:
> After running ./bootstrap, the resulting "./configure --help"
> advertises a --disable-debug option.  To me this suggests that
> debugging symbols are included by default.

The "--disable-debug" option is not about debugging symbols, but about
debugging *code* that is included by default, and activated using the
"-d" flag.  It was contrary to your expectations, but it's not far off,
and I'm pretty sure I've seen "debug" being used in that meaning
elsewhere.

In today's day and age the idea that someone would want to build an
executable leaner by several kilobytes by eliding some (infrequently
needed) functionality does seem somewhat unusual.  Still, reducing code
size is still useful in embedded systems, or on installations with
drastic storage limits, such as rescue CD distributions.

> the ./configure script also accepts --enable-debug (but does not
> advertise it in help), but that option doesn't do anything, at least
> not for gcc.

--enable-debug is the exact opposite of --disable-debug, and it's not
advertised because the debugging support is compiled in by default.

> I've found that I can get debuggings symbols by manually forcing it, using:
>
> make CFLAGS='-g -O2 -Wall'

That is the way this kind of thing is normally done.  If you
specifically need to use gdb on Wget to debug a problem, you might want
to consider dropping -O2 as well.