Building binary debug package from Firefox 3.0.11+build2+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.9.04.1 source package

[Jonathan Busby]

Since I haven't gotten a response to this question in any
of the forums or lists I've posted it, I'm posting it once
again.

I am trying to diagnose what is causing this problem :

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox-3.0/+bug/392268

in the current Firefox 3.0.11 release. Specifically, I
want to know why Firefox dies with "Couldn't load XRE
functions."

To diagnose the above, I need to be able to build an
installable binary package that is not stripped or optimized
and that has the "--enable-debug" configure option
turned on.

Now, according to Debian policy, and the changelog
for the Ubuntu Firefox source package, I should be
able to accomplish this by issuing a

'DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS="noopt nostrip debug" fakeroot debian/rules binary'

command.

The problem is that if you look inside the rules script,
you'll find that only the "noopt" flag is being honored :

'
ifneq (,$(findstring noopt,$(DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS)))
	EXTRA_SYSTEM_CONFIGURE_FLAGS += --disable-optimize
endif
'

and that 'EXTRA_SYSTEM_CONFIGURE_FLAGS', as
far as I can tell, is only used as a temporary which is
prepended to 'DEB_CONFIGURE_USER_FLAGS' .

Furthermore, I am certainly no expert with regard to the
Mozilla build system, but doing a 'grep -R' in the top
directory of the source package for the above
variable with the 'build-tree' directory extracted
( either from a previous build or from issuing :
'make -f /usr/share/cdbs/1/rules/tarball.mk pre-build' )
turns up no instances of the variable save for the one
in rules -- That is, it appears it is defined but never used.

This was not always the case if one checks the changelog,
but what it apparent is that the current source package is
broken.

So, my question comes down to this :

Given the above problems with the source package, is
there any way of creating a debug build via some
workaround?


Any help would be greatly appreciated,

Thanks,

Jonathan