On 11/11/26 06:20, Taylor R Campbell wrote:
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. MozillaWow. 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.
Yes, that's true.
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.
It works conceptually the same way, but for some reason debug symbols in mail/thunderbird are significantly larger. I can successfully build www/firefox with debug-info enabled, without pushing every process onto the swap space and eventually getting SIGKILLed.