PPAs should generate debug symbols by default

[Trent Lloyd]

PPAs can generate debug symbol packages, however the option is not enabled by default and is only discovered if after creation of the PPA you go to the "Change details" page. As a result most PPAs don't have this option enabled and it becomes difficult to solve crashes in such programs.

I have run into this myself with multiple Ubuntu customers and other community users have also hit this issue such as in Bug #1774618

I appreciate that most likely this is the case because debug symbol packages are large, however hopefully perhaps that decision can be reviewed in 2019 given the abundance of storage relative to even a decade ago.

If it's not possible to enable them by default, I think a good change would be to simply surface the setting during PPA creation instead of having to go through the extra details step. It would make it much easier for people to choose yes if they know it will help [because the change details page is not very discoverable, and this step is easy to forget], and many users are likely to leave it as the default and still save space if that is the real problem with enabling it by default.

[Nivedita Singhvi (niveditasinghvi)]

+1 from me.

[Nivedita Singhvi (niveditasinghvi)]

Especially given that sometimes we need to provide hotfixes
to customers, and need ddebs and sometimes those builds can
take very long. And we might be up against SLAs. And if you
forget it might cost you another 5-10 hrs.

If we can't make them on by default, the enablement needs
be on the top page, and visible, if possible.

[William Grant (wgrant)]

Debug symbols are very large, and we can't reasonably afford the hundreds of extra terabytes of storage that would be required to store them for everything.

There are a bunch of other things that you need to do to customise new PPAs, such as enabling extra architectures. If you're frequently setting new ones up, I'd suggest using a launchpadlib script which automatically sets the flags you need.