libc with debugging symbols?

[Myles C. Maxfield]

Hello, all,
I'm interested in learning about the internals of how libc works, so I was
hoping to link a test application with a version of libc that has debugging
symbols (reading the raw sources only gets me so far). The version of libc
that comes with FreeBSD doesn't have debugging symbols (nor should it), so
I'm wondering if there is a way to install / compile my own.

I have very naïvely checked out libc from /base/head at svn.freebsd.org,
crossed my fingers, and ran 'make', but that didn't work (for many reasons,
I'm sure). This leads me to the following questions:

1. Is it possible to check out the sources of libc (and possibly other
libraries) as they were when the FreeBSD 9.0 release was being compiled
(since that's what I'm running)? Is there a way to map this to a particular
SVN revision?
2. Is there a listing of the tools and versions used to compile libc at
that time?
3. Many other unix-like distributions have something like a libc-dbg
package in their package manager. Do you think this would be worthwhile or
even acceptable for me to try to create something similar in the ports
database? (I couldn't find anything that already exists)

Thanks,
Myles C. Maxfield