[Nix-dev] [RFC] Merging of multiple-outputs-sandbox into trunk

[Vladimír Čunát]

Hi,
the idea sounds great.

On 7 November 2011 19:56, Yury G.  Kudryashov <urkud.urkud at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2. About cyclic dependencies. An output should have a way to tell nix to
> ignore some dependencies. Say, $out/nix-support/ignored-dependencies. Use
> case: splitting debug information from the main package (main package
> explicitly tells nix that it does not depend on the debug package).

Exactly, for a long time I'm looking forward to split debug info like
in some mainstream distributions. I imagine this: all packages would
normally be built with -ggdb flag (or similar, shouldn't affect the
resulting executable) and the debug info would be split into a
separate package so users don't need to download or install it. The
info could be installed or built on-demand (perhaps even
automatically, e.g. patching drkonqi...). In fact, there are 2
possibilities of separate debug file lookup [1] and I'm not sure which
is better for NixOS. The .gnu_debuglink way would make a reference
from the executable so we would have to take care of it (as Yuri
noticed). Perhaps we could have another search method and patch gdb -
e.g. having debugging info for ${out}/ in ${out}-debug/

[1] http://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Separate-Debug-Files.html

Vlada