Beware of (no) debug...

[Ivan Noris <noris bgs sk>]

Hi all,

have to write this to the list, because it was driving me crazy!

In Garnome there is gar.gnome.mk, where (by default) --disable-static
and other interesting arguments for ./configure are given...

By default, debugging seems to be turned on (--enable-debug and CFLAGS
+= -g). Guess what I need to do, if I want my build to be faster...
yeah, I'm switching to "release" build, that means, --disable-debug.

As this file seems to be included in all Garnome's Makefile, this way
you turn debugging completely off... whis is good for release builds...

...well, in fact, there is BIG difference in compiling and running some
packages with --disable-debug. This package is GTK+ (and maybe glib).

I've had some serious critical problems with stable Evolution (1.4.6)
and GTK+ compiled with --disable-debug. It crashed when attaching image
files to the Evolution's Composer...

After some experimenting and reading docs in GTK+, I need to note (as
well as the GTK+'s developers): please DON'T compile GTK+ with
--disable-debug! The default in GTK+ is compile with
--enable-debug=minimum, as soon you don't specify --disable-debug off
course...

So, now I have gar.gnome.mk with:

# Enable debugging -> THIS IS GOOD!
#CONFIGURE_ARGS += --enable-debug
#CFLAGS += -g
 
# Disable debugging -> for RELEASE use
 
CONFIGURE_ARGS += --disable-debug
#CFLAGS += -g

and in GTK+'s (and glib's) Makefile I have:
CONFIGURE_ARGS += --enable-debug=minimum
...
include ../category.mk
...
CONFIGURE_ARGS := $(shell echo $(CONFIGURE_ARGS) | sed
's,--disable-debug,,')

(which removes --disable-debug from CONFIGURE_ARGS before ./configure is
ran in GTK+).

Now Evolution does not crash in the same case, although it writes
warning messages (when attaching files with images). I have filled
bugreport against GTK+ (was closed as NOTGNOME) and against Evolution
(was not confirmed yet by developers). But this workaround with
--enable-debug works and seems to be safe anyway, if you would do the
same as me (release build of Garnome).

I hope this mail will be helpful at least to someone :) It took me
almost whole day to hack out of this...

Regards,
-- 
  Ing. Ivan Noris
  System engineer, Business Global Systems, a.s.
  info & public key: http://www.bgs.sk/people/noris
  __________________________________________________________________
  "Semper cautus - semper paratus - semper idem Vix."