Jackson asked me whether it's possible to add debugging information to ilasm a couple of hours ago. Well, I wasn't totally sure without looking at the code, so I sat down and gave it a try. It turned out to be really straightforward and I finished it a lot quicker that I expected :-)
Now, you do not only get source lines in backtraces of assemblies compiled with ilasm, this also works in the debugger - and the debugger will "feel" like if you're just debugging managed code - it'll have all the information about the source code, methods and types. The only thing which is left to do is adding support for local variables, but this isn't really hard.
There's also request from some people to move the debugging information into a separate file rather than having it included in the assembly as a resource since this'll obviously make the assemblies smaller. At the moment, I'm doing this in ilasm since it was a lot easier to implement, but not yet in mcs, so there's still room for discussion. When this issue was brought up initially, I was a bit concerned about versioning issues, especially that people might have a symbol file which does not match the assembly (for instance because someone installs a new version of an assembly and forgets to remove the old debugging information). However, Ben pointed out that it's really easy to add some "magic" number to the symbol file (which could be the assembly's GUID) to make sure it matches the correct assembly.
Since the current situation is a bit broken and out-of-sync (ilasm uses an external file, mcs doesn't), I'd like to resolve this issue quickly, but there's still some room for discussions - so if you have any comments, just lemme know.
In the meantime, partial classes also hit gmcs, so they're now actually everywhere. I already got a minor bug report, but I already know what it is and it's easy to fix ...
The rest of the week is dedicated to both mcs and gmcs bug fixing. While I was busy hacking on gmcs over the last couple of weeks, we got quite a few pending bugs open in bugzilla, so I'll try to find some time to fix them. gmcs is also a priority and there's also this symbol file thing mentioned above, so we'll have to see.
I really hope that we're getting good weather tomorrow, since I'm going to an open air concert in the evening :-)