Launchpad bug id: 842688

I can see that the binaries in the packages from Ubuntu repo (e.g. 5.5.39 for Trusty) are also stripped, so I start wondering if there is some kind of policy that we've been following even though nobody remembers it.

Assigning to Otto Kekäläinen to comment and decide whether we can have debug info, after all.

Lack of debug symbols in the regular package indeed looks like it's an accepted standard.

However, other software has separate packages that have binaries with debug info. For example:

postgresql-9.3 - object-relational SQL database, version 9.3 server
postgresql-9.3-dbg - debug symbols for postgresql-9.3

drizzle - Server binaries for Drizzle Database
drizzle-dbg - Debugging symbols for Drizzle

and so forth. It's very widely used, I assume there is a standard convention about what one can expect from the mariadb-server-dbg package.

I also recall packages that had just debugging info (as opposed to having unstripped binaries, like the above examples do), but maybe it was in an RPM-based distribution.

To recap: In Debian and Ubuntu normal packages are not supposed to contain debug symbols, they are stripped when the binary packages are created.

Ubuntu however provides automatically a facility that has the debug symbols, so that users can install them and get better stack traces. See details at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingProgramCrash#Debug_Symbol_Packages (and examples at http://ddebs.ubuntu.com/pool/universe/m/mariadb-10.0/)

Sergei Petrunia Did you notice my comment above? Can we close this issue with the remark that debug info can be found in separate packages and the main packages will not include them, now nor in the future?

Otto Kekäläinen, http://ddebs.ubuntu.com/pool/universe/m/mariadb-10.0/ looks like exactly what I wanted. I also see http://ddebs.ubuntu.com/pool/universe/m/mariadb-5.5/ , which has debug info for the several recent 5.5 versions.

But where can I find debug symbols for the binaries that I get from mariadb.org, for example from here:
https://downloads.mariadb.org/mariadb/repositories/#mirror=timeweb&distro=Ubuntu&distro_release=utopic--ubuntu_utopic&version=10.0

I assume ddebs.ubuntu.com has debug info for Ubuntu's packages which are generally different?
Also, mariadb.org provides packages for alpha/beta versions: http://mirror.timeweb.ru/mariadb/repo/10.1/ubuntu/pool/main/m/mariadb-10.1/ Is there any way to get ddebs for these?

AFAIK the mariadb.org repositories don't have debug builds. I don't maintain the mariadb.org repos, but I think they are simply the ouput of downloading the source and running ./debian/autobake-deb.sh. You could try building debs yourself with a version where the rules file has a custom override_dh_strip like done in https://github.com/ottok/galera/blob/3.x/debian/rules

Unfortunately I don't have time right now to create debug version stuff for mariadb.org repos. There are more urgent stuff in packaging right now, like for example to merge upstream the whole new Debian packaging done in the latest 1-2 years.