This would lose a feature that I find valuable: usually, recompiling a package with the debug option will generate a binary whose symbols are compatible with the "normal" packaged binary. I have used this several times to chase down hard-to-find library compatibility bugs, or to interpret core-files from crashes that are difficult to reproduce.
For that matter, there are also Heisenbugs to consider: some bugs only appear in the optimized version, not the un-optimized. Compiling the debugging version with different optimization flags would make tracking down these bugs needlessly difficult. For what it's worth, I have never had a problem with debugging optimized code. The line numbers sometimes jump around a bit, but always in a predictable way. -- Richard Braakman "I sense a disturbance in the force" "As though millions of voices cried out, and ran apt-get." (Anthony Towns about the Debian 3.0 release)
