I've been trying to set up a debugable version of fipy in virtualenv for debugging a trilinos issue. Here are the steps:

• Install the python-dbg package from the Debian repositories.

• Use mkvirtualenv -p python-dbg debug to make the debug environment.

• Install numpy with pip install, not debug.

• Install swig in the standard way.

• Here is the do-configure for trilinos

  EXTRA_ARGS=$@
  TRILINOS_HOME=/users/wd15/Documents/python/trilinos-10.8.3-Source
  CMAKE=cmake
  PYTHON_EXECUTABLE=${VIRTUAL_ENV}/bin/python
  
  ${CMAKE} \
    -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE:STRING=DEBUG \
    -D Trilinos_ENABLE_PyTrilinos:BOOL=ON \
    -D BUILD_SHARED_LIBS:BOOL=ON \
    -D Trilinos_ENABLE_ALL_OPTIONAL_PACKAGES:BOOL=ON \
    -D TPL_ENABLE_MPI:BOOL=ON \
    -D Trilinos_ENABLE_TESTS:BOOL=ON \
    -D PYTHON_EXECUTABLE:FILEPATH=${PYTHON_EXECUTABLE} \
    -D DART_TESTING_TIMEOUT:STRING=600 \
    -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=${VIRTUAL_ENV} \
    -D PyTrilinos_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=${VIRTUAL_ENV} \
    ${EXTRA_ARGS} \
    ${TRILINOS_HOME}