Problems with debug packages on ubuntu 9.10 karmic

[Thomas Mittelstaedt]

Am Montag, den 08.02.2010, 05:06 +0100 schrieb Thomas Mittelstaedt:
> Hallo,
> 
> I have problems producing bug reports containing backtraces with all
> debug symbols. Even though I do have the dbg packages installed, gdb 7
> doesn't pick them up automatically, neither for an installed app like 
> rhythmbox nor for a custom build of gnome evolution.
> The non-stripped libraries get installed under /usr/lib/debug and I
> tried to use add-symbol-file, to load the symbols. And this procedure
> would only be partly successful, i.e. in the backtrace, some function
> calls of a library would show nicely while others would be just the
> usual '???'.
> 
> See https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=606881 and
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/page.cgi?id=trace.html&trace_id=220468.
> 
> Any help appreciated!
> 
> 
> -- 
> thomas
> 

Well, to answer my own question.
I used the following to load some (not all) symbols of 
the debug version of the libraries via:

(gdb) set sysroot foo # set sysroot to non-existent directory
(gdb) set solib-search-path /usr/lib/debug/:/usr/lib/debug/lib:...<other
paths>

Looks like gdb does not descent recursively into /usr/lib/debug, e.g.
for the debug version of /lib/libglib-2.0.so.0 to get its debug
information loaded, I had to add 
/usr/lib/debug/lib to solib-search-path.

See also in the gdb info documentation
"18.2 Debugging Information in Separate Files"

-- 
thomas