the beos system loader seems to have problems loading some of mozilla's libraries/components when they contain debugger info, rendering beos debug builds pretty much useless. however, the same code, when compiled without -g, loads/runs just fine. to work around the problem, i've modified configure.in, config/config.mk, and config/autoconf.mk.in to provide support for a new argument to configure: --with-dbgrinfo-modules. using this argument, the user can specify which modules, if any, will be compiled with the -g flag, but without changing the value of the DEBUG preprocessor variable. for example: configure --enable-debug --with-dbgrinfo-modules=^ALL_MODULES,widget,raptor will cause all sources to be compiled with DEBUG set (so you'll still see debug output, ASSERTs, etc), but only the .so's belonging to the widget and raptor modules to be compiled with -g. note that the special module name ALL_MODULES can be used to set the default behavior, and prefixing a module name with ^ disables -g for that module (this is because --without-dbgrinfo-modules can't accept arguments). the default value for --with-dbgrinfo-modules is ALL_MODULES, so, in a debug build, all sources are compiled with -g. the patch also fixes the --with-debug-modules configure argument, allowing a user to override the global --enable/disable-debug value for specific modules. this is of limited value, however, since anything which uses nsCOMPtrs (everything) must be compiled with DEBUG set the same as it was when the xpcom module was compiled, or you'll get link problems...

Patch has been checked in.

reassigning QA contact to justin@68k.org as I don't have a BeOS system on which to verify this. Justin - if the fix is in and looks good, select "mark bug verified" otherwise select "reopen".

the patch works under the beos, and didn't break any of the other unix builds, so i'm verifying it as fixed.