I'd be really happy with any debug symbols in a single or multiple package.

The lack of this, along with MDEV-6367, is making it hard to make debug builds in a reasonable time and this that is stopping me from getting essential information about a memory leak on MDEV-6300.

Looks like galera has done this: https://github.com/codership/galera/pull/116/files.

otto are you able to help here?

Yes, in Debian by default binaries are stripped. If will make the binaries much smaller and 99,999% of the time end-users don't need binaries with debug symbols. If debug versions are wanted, they are most often installed from a development repository and the packages are named dbg. For example I've done galera-dbg and I can do mariadb-server(5.5/10.0)-dbg too, but right now I don't have any extra time on my hands.

This is not assigned to anybody so I'll assign it to myself so I'll remember to return to it later.

In Debian and Ubuntu normal packages are not supposed to contain debug symbols, they are stipped when the binary packages are created.

Ubuntu however provides automatically a facility that has the debug symbols, so that users can install them and get better stack traces. See details at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingProgramCrash#Debug_Symbol_Packages (and examples at http://ddebs.ubuntu.com/pool/universe/m/mariadb-10.0/)

Also it looks like this issue is a duplicate of https://mariadb.atlassian.net/browse/MDEV-658 (or the other way around, as 572 is older)

Since December 2015 Debian also generates automatic debug symbol packages, see e.g. http://snapshot.debian.org/package/mariadb-10.0/10.0.22-6/#mariadb-server-10.0-dbgsym_10.0.22-6