I often find the need to rebuild a package with debug symbols (if no -dbg is available).
sudo apt-get build-dep <package> apt-get source <package> cd <package> # eventually patch sources DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=nostrip dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -uc -us cd .. dpkg -i <package>.deb
Et voilà :) Now i can gdb it or run sysprof. (It's also a very fast way to start hacking on a program)