Fwd: Drkonqi debug package installer for kde 4.4

[Jonathan Riddell]

Forwarding e-mail as we'll need to look into this for Lucid.

Jonathan

----- Forwarded message from George Kiagiadakis <kiagiadakis.george at gmail.com> -----

From: George Kiagiadakis <kiagiadakis.george at gmail.com>
To: kde-packager at kde.org
Subject: Drkonqi debug package installer for kde 4.4
Date: Sat, 26 Sep 2009 22:04:02 +0300

Dear packagers,

I am writing this mail on behalf of the drkonqi team (me and Dario Andres), to 
inform you about a new feature of drkonqi (for KDE 4.4) that you need to know 
about.

As you already know, most distros that make binary packages ship debugging 
symbols in separate packages. To make valid backtraces in drkonqi, we need 
those packages installed, however it is sometimes difficult for novice users to 
understand what they need to install and how. So, in drkonqi trunk we have 
added a button that gives users the option to install automatically the needed 
debug symbols packages, if the backtrace is not good enough.

To make this work, drkonqi is designed to launch an external application 
(shell script or whatever else) with the binaries that need symbols as 
arguments, and it expects this application to do all the work. I guess you can 
understand why, it is impossible to have a unified way to do this for all 
distributions and it is impossible either to write scripts for each and every 
distro out there to support this functionality. So, if you want your 
distribution to support this feature, you need to write this 
application/script by yourselves.

There is full documentation about this in 
kdebase/runtime/drkonqi/doc/debug_package_installer.txt and also some example 
scripts for debian, suse and fedora in kdebase/runtime/drkonqi/doc/examples/.
As I mention in the doc, these scripts are just examples and are not going to 
be maintained, but you may use them if you want, either verbatim or as a 
reference to write your own.

I am telling you about this quite early so that there is enough time to work 
on this feature. If you intend to ship 4.4 beta or rc, it would be nice to 
have this feature there as early as possible, so that we can (hopefully) get 
more useful crash reports and also test this feature. However, it is entirely 
up to you whether you will enable this feature or not and when.

Any feedback on this is welcome :)

Best regards,
George


PS: Well, I know, it would be way better if we didn't get any crashes at all, 
but that's nearly impossible ;)