[Bug 1517257] Re: apport-retrace should install and use gdb for target release

[Martin Pitt]

I reverted http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~apport-
hackers/apport/trunk/revision/3076 in http://bazaar.launchpad.net
/~apport-hackers/apport/trunk/revision/3080.

This cannot work like this as we need a gdb command which  can actually
run on the host. This is not the case when processing crashes from
foreign architectures. This is already breaking with an i386 sandbox on
amd64:

$ file /tmp/si386/usr/bin/gdb
/tmp/si386/usr/bin/gdb: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib/ld-linux.so.2, for GNU/Linux 2.6.32, BuildID[sha1]=4797df5acda65947a8d421d67e9bc772986ca5ba, stripped

$ ldd /tmp/si386/usr/bin/gdb
	not a dynamic executable
$ /tmp/si386/usr/bin/gdb
bash: /tmp/si386/usr/bin/gdb: not found

This could be made to work with some multi-arch magic on the host, but
it will break completely when trying to retrace armhf or ppc reports.

So we'd need to download the apt indexes twice: once for the target arch
and downloading the debs/ddebs, and another time for downloading gdb and
gdb-multiarch for the host architecture. This is prohibitively expensive
when doing it every time, so we need to add a lot of local caching for
that. This is also a lot of work, I'm afraid.

** Changed in: apport
   Importance: Undecided => Wishlist

** Changed in: apport
       Status: Fix Released => Triaged

** Changed in: apport (Ubuntu)
       Status: Fix Committed => Triaged

** Changed in: apport (Ubuntu)
     Assignee: Martin Pitt (pitti) => (unassigned)

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1517257

Title:
  apport-retrace should install and use gdb for target release

Status in Apport:
  Triaged
Status in apport package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  apport-retrace will use the version of gdb installed on the system
  performing the retrace. This can cause issues retracing crash reports
  from releases that have a newer toolchain revision than the system
  performing the retrace. Subsequently, it would be better if apport-
  retrace were to install gdb into the sandbox being used for retracing
  and used that version of gdb for analyzing the core dump.

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