There were concerns about this taking too much space in binary cache so for now we have only added it to libraries whose rebuild would be too much effort for user, not leaf packages.

That's actually a fair argument, however I guess that the packages I changed are rather popular (and not that many), so the outcome wins here - at least in my opinion.

@edolstra do the concerns you raised back in 2016 still apply? (tbh I'm not sure about what the current upstream infrastructure is able to withstand). If needed I'm also happy to provide more detailed information about the per-package impact on storage.

I don't think this is a good idea. It's one thing to provide debug symbols for some widely used libraries (e.g. Qt), but who really needs debug symbols for htop?

@edolstra so your main issue with this is that htop (and similar pkgs in here) aren't something you usually need to debug?

The main purpose here is that I wanted to add debug symbols to a few packages I frequently use to be able to easily debug e.g. core-dumps. But I agree that this list is fairly arbitrary and we may want to select a few more (or different) packages.

But may I ask if there's any reason not to enable a debug-output on (more or less) every derivation in nixpkgs? Being able to load debug-symbols for a (possibly broken) package (if needed) from the binary cache is IMHO an incredible useful feature :)

@Ma27 binary cache size: #18530

@lheckemann I'm aware of that discussion, it's been referenced by @jtojnar already. I mainly asked since I don't know how much of the binary-cache size can be used to serve debug-symbols of packages.

I think Eelco’s point was that the storage requirements would outweigh costs of occasional rebuilding of leaf packages. Especially since the cache keeps build artefacts indefinitely.

Estimates are in the thread: #18530 (comment)

I think Eelco’s point was that the storage requirements would outweigh costs of occasional rebuilding of leaf packages. Especially since the cache keeps build artefacts indefinitely.

Fair enough 👍