I can't speak as to whether or not it would be a good idea for -dbg packages to run unit tests, but their nominal purpose is that they contain extra symbols to

I can't speak as to whether or not it would be a good idea for -dbg packages to run unit tests, but their nominal purpose is that they contain extra symbols to allow for debugging. http://wiki.debian.org/DebugPackage http://wiki.debian.org/DebugPackage