Is there a single flag to initiate an entire slackware debug build? I looked at the source and I feel I am missing something. But then again maybe it's not done often.

No, because there isn't any one script to build Slackware. You would have to find the debug compilation flag for each program, edit the SlackBuild accordingly, then recompile the package.

That's too bad. It is basically impossible without a lot of work then. I might try setting CFLAGS = CPPFLAGS = CXXFLAGS = -g and then just see what happens.

The issue is that Slackware is not designed to be rebuilt all at once. Pat only upgrades individual packages as needed, he never recompiles the whole OS at once (in fact, some packages haven't been recompiled for several versions of Slackware because they don't need to be recompiled and work fine). There are a few massive build scripts, like for X and KDE (probably others, but those are the only two I've dealt with) that can be used build a multitude of packages from one SlackBuild (while also being able to compile individual packages as needed), but everything else is managed individually.

If you're interested in a debug build of Slackware, it might be worth looking into the Slackware from Scratch thread. They might have a more automated build process where you could easily add debugging to the programs.

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So slackware isn't like other distributions, providing both debug and non-debug packages. And you have recognized that most packages don't provide them, and you'll need to rebuild to get the symbols. But rebuilding the entire OS to have them will require alot more disk space. Are you sure you need them? Usually I just focus on the application I am concerned with fix it, and move on.

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@bassmadrigal interesting that there is not already a SFS (slackware from scratch) distro out there.

I have not tried LFS in a long time but I do recall that you pointed it to repos and then you step through the build. Now I wonder if it's feasible to point LFS build scripts at slackware repos. But then I might as well just use LFS.

If you want to rebuild all of slackware with debug symbols, you're basically going to be doing all the work of an LFS install anyway, except with less support available.

Yes, but then again LFS takes a long time to go through unless you have a large block of time to do it all at once it's hard to do LFS with hours, days or weeks in between steps or start and completion. One mistake and it's over.