[OE-core] RFC: automatic -dbg splitting

[Burton, Ross]

Hi all,

On 11 June 2014 20:10, Burton, Ross <ross.burton at intel.com> wrote:
> I know there are recipes floating around that have multiple -dbg
> packages, but I can't see a great rationale for that.  I also can't
> see a reason why you'd want debug objects/sources outside of the -dbg
> package, or something that wasn't a debug object or source inside the
> -dbg package.

So last night I resurrected this patch and did an oe-core world build
with a small change to clear FILES_${PN}-dbg before automatically
populating it.  The results were interesting and invalidated my two
assumptions:

1) Adding files that are not debug symbols or sources to -dbg packages
is done: both gcc and glib add Python code for gdb to execute and the
-dbg package is the obvious location for it.

2) A recipe having multiple -dbg packages is sensible for eg Qt4,
which if all the debug information is put into a single package
results in a 367M package, expanding to 1.1G on disk.

So I've a proposed change to the logic:
* If there are multiple names in PACKAGES that match *-dbg, then don't
do automatic debug packaging
* The default value for FILES_PN-dbg in bitbake.conf should be empty,
and recipes can extend it as required (e.g. gdb Python scripts) with
the automatic debug packaging extending FILES_PN-dbg.

Any thoughts?

Ross