When building and distributing packages and binaries you preferably don't want them to take up gigabytes of space on the disk. Stripping debug information from these distributed binaries are one way of saving a lot of space, but makes debugging crashing applications had. Debug packages collects the stripped information into separate packages which can be installed to provide the necessary information to debug crashing application.

Arch Linux implemented support for debug packages in 2022, and in this presentation we will take a look at the improvements that was made to the pacman package manager, the infrastructure changes that was needed and how debug packages are distributed through debuginfod.