It seems that I am getting PREFERRED_VERSION warnings when creating a foo-dbg packagegroup for a foo packagegroup. This is wrong in my opinion. I ought to be able to tell Yocto what -dbg means for me. Yocto currently assumes that it is always non-stripped release binaries which is simply wrong in certain situations. On embedded devices where size matters, surely, release is built with -O2 and without -g, let alone -DDEBUG. For debug, the situation is the opposite: -O0 -DDEBUG -g, etc. Yocto should not dictate it unconditionally what I really want to see in my release and debug package groups. I would like to be able to have completely different builds for those package group types, otherwise debugging might be sub-optimal; just think about optimized values when stepping through the code with gdb, etc.
The convention of a -dbg package is pretty hardcoded into the OE-Core metadata at this point and would be hard to remove. I'd therefore suggest if you want to generate you own packages you used a different suffix from the one used by the system. FWIW, for any packagegroup, a packagegroup-dbg is automatically generated. CLosing this as WONTFIX, its really more of a CANTFIX though.