Debugging and emerge

I've been trying to pin down some annoying crashes that I've been
experiencing so I've been trying to create debug builds of various
packages. I thought at one point that I could just say USE="debug"
emerge xfce-utils and xfce-utils would get built with debugging symbols.
I'm pretty sure this used to work in the past. 

Now, however, if I do this, -g does not get added to the gcc compile
flags and the executable is stripped. I find that I can only get a debug
build if I manually change the ebuild and add a line that says:

inherit debug

Is this how things should be or is there something wrong with my system?

I've also seen some people talk about a "no strip" flag that can be
added. How is that different from USE="debug"?

Allen

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