How to build program with debug symbols

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2007-02-22 16:03, Gerard <gerard at seibercom.net> wrote:
> FreeBSD-6.2
> I need to know how to build a program with debugging symbols. The
> problem I am having is that claws-mail-2.7.2 continually crashes but
> does not display any debug symbols. I talked with the claws-mail
> people, and they advised me to build a version with debug symbols
> since the output I supplied them was useless without it. Their
> suggestion was that I build from a tarball and use the proper ‘config’
> flags to get debug symbols included in the program. The problem is
> that I would rather not mess with that scenario, but rather use the
> port version instead. The port version does have an option to build a
> debug version, but apparently, the symbols are stripped out when the
> program is installed.
>
> The port maintainer suggested that I use this is the Makefile:
>
> 	"STRIP= #empty"
>
> However, he is not even sure if it will work. I just want to find out
> what the best way to go about this is so that I can get this problem
> resolved.

I think it's much better to avoid tweaking ${STRIP} and set DEBUG_FLAGS
instead.  You have to make sure that at least the claws-mail-2.7.2 port
is *rebuilt* from source.  The following should work fine:

    # cd /usr/ports/mail/claws-mail
    # make deinstall
    # env DEBUG_FLAGS='-ggdb' make install

The STRIP variable is explicitly set to an empty value when DEBUG_FLAGS
is defined, so you get both a debugging *and* non-stripped binary by
setting DEBUG_FLAGS.

- Giorgos