Re: mail/thunderbird: I finally found out the cause of its massive memory requirement for building

[Taylor R Campbell <riastradh%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2026 21:06:05 +0000 (UTC)
> From: Benny Siegert <bsiegert%netbsd.org@localhost>
> 
> On Wed, 11 Nov 2026, PHO wrote:
> 
> > Turned out there was a separate option for disabling debug symbols, namely 
> > --disable-debug-symbols, which had to be explicitly given if one wanted to 
> > stop it from getting killed by the kernel for running short of swap. Mozilla
> 
> Wow. Why would you ever want --disable debug but not 
> --disable-debug-symbols?

Presuambly enabling _debug_ makes the application unusably slow by
turning on a zillion redundant consistency checks and turning off
optimizations, but enabling debug _symbols_ makes crash dumps useful
without incurring any performance penalty at runtime.

At least, this is how the www/firefox `debug' vs `debug-info' options
work.  The `debug-info' option has been invaluable to me for real
diagnostics (like `why does firefox crash instantly at boot? oh right,
because I forgot to install any fonts in this chroot'), so I always
have it on.  In contrast, I'm not sure I have never found the `debug'
option useful (though it's a little less bad than it was some years
ago now that it uses -Og instead of -O0).

If mail/thunderbird works the same way, perhaps it should have the
same options.

This would also be more useful if we had split debug data packages.