whats debug symbols

my dc++ crushes cause i don,t have debug symbols installed what can i do to install them ,where do i find them

"Debug symbols? What? Look in your DC++ directory. Look for the file DCPlusPlus.pdb. In this file, contain all ‘debug symbols’. This file is used when DC++ tries to create exceptionsinfo.txt. With DCPlusPlus.pdb, information about the crash (eg, where in the code it crashed) is given to the exceptionsinfo.txt. You can see sometimes the lack of the .pdb file in exceptionsinfo.txt if it contain an overwhelming amount of question marks.

Like the message says, there’s no way of knowing why DC++ crashed without this file. So, hurry go and download it if you don’t got it. (It is provided with the .zip…)"

This is the answer found on http://dcpp.wordpress.com , hope it helps.

Having the debug symbols file installed won't keep DC++ from crashing. Also the pdb file is available only for DC++ 0.699 or older. What version of DC++ do you use? Have you tried to upgrade to the latest?

The pdb was for visual C++ compiling. If you want to help in debugging DC++, you need to compile the sourcecode in debug mode ( not release) and don't strip the exe of the symbols. This will create a debug version of approx 100 mb executable. Then you need to run DC++ via gdb ( gnu debugger) and recreate the crash. Then, gdb can give you a stack trace so the bug can be found.
As a simple user there is nothing you can really do, perhaps explain what you did when it happened...
Anyway, the lack of debugging symbols isnt a crash reason, just an error message when it does and windows tries to see why it happened...