Splitting debug symbols into separate packages is expected. Splitting them into a separate repository is a bit surprising but no big deal.
The problem with NixOS is that it doesn’t ship debug symbols at all.
Nix does at least make it easy to rebuild a package with debug symbols enabled, but:
- Some packages take a very long time to rebuild.
- IIUC, the standard builds are done without debug info enabled at all, rather than building with it enabled and then deleting it. Usually, whether debug info is enabled shouldn’t affect any other aspects of code generation, so rebuilding with debug info should produce a symbol-rich binary that’s compatible with existing core dumps for the original binary. But this is not always the case.
- If the package you want debug info for is a library, Nix will want to rebuild not just the library itself but everything that (transitively) depends on it. This is really a more general problem with Nix: it has zero notion of ABI compatibility. But always building with debug info would work around the problem.
The problem with NixOS is that it doesn’t ship debug symbols at all.
Nix does at least make it easy to rebuild a package with debug symbols enabled, but:
- Some packages take a very long time to rebuild.
- IIUC, the standard builds are done without debug info enabled at all, rather than building with it enabled and then deleting it. Usually, whether debug info is enabled shouldn’t affect any other aspects of code generation, so rebuilding with debug info should produce a symbol-rich binary that’s compatible with existing core dumps for the original binary. But this is not always the case.
- If the package you want debug info for is a library, Nix will want to rebuild not just the library itself but everything that (transitively) depends on it. This is really a more general problem with Nix: it has zero notion of ABI compatibility. But always building with debug info would work around the problem.