I think you need to calm down a bit. SFML changes undergoe pretty extensive testing before being pushed to the main branch, and even more testing before an official release is made. That being said, the team is small and its unfair to expect them to be able to test everything, especially since, for example, the MacOS and mobile sides have few contributors.
To the point, nothing is stopping you from building SFML yourself and using the symbols from those. SFML does not need to ship with debug symbols.
You're missing my point. I was demonstrating that it IS ordinary for software projects to have bugs, I was not criticising that fact. My point is that since there IS a small development team, it makes sense to empower users to help in the debug process.
Given that including PDB files does not require any extra effort on the part of the development team (they are automatically built; you must specifically choose not to build them), it puzzles me that they would not be included.
I'm not aware of any reason why I should not be able to debug open-source code;
You can of course, just not with the officially provided files. AS Gambit pointed out you can build it yourself, though it even might need a tweak in CMake, otherwise you'd end up with multiple vs12.pdb files or similar.
How is this a justification for not releasing the prebuilt ones? I'm wondering why PDB files are intentionally not included, forcing users to build them themselves. I'm understanding of any reason it somehow puts unnecessary burden on the dev team, but I'm not seeing one.
It's not as if it's bug-free, to my knowledge, there are 55 bugs being tracked in the git at the moment.
No software is ever bug free. Git is used for version control not for tracking bugs. The issue tracker is hosted on GitHub, which is a Git front-end, but not Git itself.
I was not implying anything critical about the subject, I was pointing out that very fact that every project is vulnerable to bugs and so empowering users to debug it works towards the goal of reducing them.
As for git, doesn't it seem a little bit like pointless arguing of semantics here? We both know what I was referring too. The fact I said Git and not "Hosted on Github" is neither here nor there.
After I recently ran into this post, I've been left wondering if we shouldn't care more about the PDB files.
If you're wondering whether we should care more about them, barring any reason that they should not be included, why not just include them? Once again, I'm not seeing any reason whatsoever why they should not be.