non-component debug is not really supported on any platform and I wouldn't expect it to work.

You're correct that this is, however, the default build config for GN (and GYP).

We want to change this, but are waiting for GYP to be gone first.

I would either wontfix this, or retitle it to something like "GN debug builds should default to component" (I don't think we have a bug on file for that yet).

Why is the default developer configuration moving ever further away from what we ship to users? I primarily care about what we ship. I believe that the bug as written is important and should be resolved as initially requested.

There's "what we ship to users" and "what is optimal for developers", and "static debug" is neither of those things. 

We already have too many build configurations to support, and supporting "static debug" does not buy us anything. The bug as written isn't going to be fixed unless you get a chromium-wide agreement that we should support this configuration, because it's currently considered unsupported.

That’s all news to me. Who decided that, Dirk? Who announced it?

In fact, none of our current build instructions tell you to do this. They may mention it as an option, but that’s, uh, optional. http://dev.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/get-the-code, for example.

Static debug is still closer to static optimized than shared debug is. If I want debug, that doesn’t imply that I want to accept all sorts of other deltas from what we ship.

I'm not sure that that was ever announced somewhere; it may be tribal knowledge (which I freely grant isn't a good thing).

The closest thing I'm finding at the moment is

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/topic/gn-dev/74vGV19Kq4w/discussion

which of course isn't even a discussion on chromium-dev.

I believe that static debug w/ full symbols flat-out doesn't work on windows due to either toolchain or linker constraints, but someone like brucedawson@ or scottmg@ would have to confirm that for me.

If you can get a consensus from people that we should support static debug on some platforms, then I'm fine w/ someone doing the work to add builders for such a config.

A static (non-component) debug build of the 'all' target on Windows does not work. This bothers me but it has been thus for a long time.

It seems like it *should* work, but on the other hand it is not a configuration that is particularly practical or used at all.

A static debug build of 'chrome' should work, but is rarely used.

(removing r-v-g, nothing secret. looks like there was a chromium-dev thread about this that kind of went off topic though)

Yup, I started a thread on chromium-dev about this:

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/topic/chromium-dev/LWRR3fMlvQ4/discussion

with this being the conclusion:

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msg/chromium-dev/LWRR3fMlvQ4/5VZc1Zu1BgAJ

As a part of that, we're not going to add static debug builders for non-iOS platforms; iOS only supports static, so we have them there now. However, we will also not intentionally break or desupport static debug at this time.