Separate debug information

If I build an application with RelWithDebInfo build type I will get a release with debug information build.

Now if I want to distribute the application I don't want to ship the debug information, since it tends to be big. But make it available in the situation that my application crashes so that the call stack makes sense.

CMake offers in CPackDeb.cmake the ability to have files generated by objcopy --only-keep-debug calls.

Unfortunately there is nothing about dsymutil for macOS.

Users have done the following for macOS:

find_program(DSYMUTIL_PROGRAM dsymutil)
if (DSYMUTIL_PROGRAM)
  foreach(lang C CXX)
    foreach(var LINK_EXECUTABLE CREATE_SHARED_LIBRARY)
      set(CMAKE_${lang}_${var} "${CMAKE_${lang}_${var}}" "${DSYMUTIL_PROGRAM} <TARGET>")
    endforeach()
  endforeach()
endif()

I was thinking at having a per target property SEPARATE_DEBUG_INFO initialized by CMAKE_SEPARATE_DEBUG_INFO which would call objcopy --only-keep-debug for GNU, dsymutil for macOS/Clang.

Then when the user issues an install(TARGET) add the above generated debug file to a component named DebugInfo.

Then when the user does a cmake --install . --component DebugInfo the debug files will be installed. This would include the MSVC's PDB files.

Then one just has to pack / archive the directory and it's not specific only to a CPack format.