Re: Debug libs

[David Ayers]

Hello,

AFICT debug=yes defines DEBUG yet has no effect on NDEBUG.  DEBUG is 
used rather sparsely in core (I think Alex M. identified only 2 or three 
places in -base).  Most of the logging functions in -core depend on 
NDEBUG.  So there is not really that much of a difference wrt logging 
capabilities between debug=yes/no.

Now before someone goes changing that, I want to point out that I think 
that I believe it's a good thing that debug and default (ie non-debug) 
libraries do not differ in code generation.  We have enough trouble 
hunting down bugs as it is.  Especially when we don't have the platform 
readily available and we ask users to try the debug version with gdb and 
the bugs would suddenly disappear.

If someone specifically wants a version w/o that debugging info, they 
could still request it with CPPFLAGS=-DNDEBUG . Well I guess NSDebug.h 
would need to define empty debug macros when NDEBUG isn't defined.

Looks like cleaning that up is a separate project...

But back to debug=yes/no.  I think the only thing this should do, is add 
debug information to the executables (i.e. -g).

Cheers,
David

PS: FWIW, I still don't think that installing standard/debug/profile 
libs in parallel is a good idea.  But *if* we do actually keep this 
feature then we should at least rethink whether -make should go out of 
it's way to link non-matching executables.