As a first step, I replaced dontStrip = true with separateDebugInfo = true in my geant4 overlay, expecting it to add a debug output to the result. This appears not to have happened. Is it my implementation or my expectation that is wrong?
I didn’t go down the nixseparatedebuginfod route, because I got the impression that it requires a service to be configured on the user’s machine, and this is something that the majority of the users of our library cannot be expected to do: if it doesn’t work out of the box with nix develop, nix shell or nix run it might as well not exist. But maybe I’ve misunderstood how the debuginfod universe works.
Edit: Also …
Is debuginfod ELF or Linux only? We need to support MacOS.
And there seem to be at least a couple ([1], [2]) of almost year-old open issues in nixpkgs about enableDebugging and separateDebugInfo not working on Darwin.
All in all, it seems that persuading Nix to build geant4 with debug symbols is likely to provide the most robust method for our needs.