i am just wondering if i can tell gcc to embed the absolute path to a source file in the debug information, even if i call gcc like
gcc -g ../src/somecode.c -o .
What platform are you building for and what is the native debugging format for that platform? Not that this information will necessarily get you closer to solving your problem, but it may be worth looking at the specification for the debug format to see if what you want to do even makes sense from that perspective.
You are passing the '-g' option to the compiler right.
gcc -fdebug-prefix-map=..=$(readlink -f ..)