Being nice to testers - mandating debug packages

[Sebastien Bacher]

Le vendredi 13 janvier 2006 à 16:53 +0100, David Nielsen a écrit :
> Hi list

hi,

> Instead testers are asked in most cases to recompile the application and
> needed libraries in an almost painfully Gentoo like fasion - although
> easy to manage this takes time and personally all I have to work with is
> a 1600+ Athlon-XP when there's a crasher bug in something big like
> Firefox or Evolution I, personally, tend to try to avoid filing them
> because both those applications take more than an hour to compile.

We agree than having debugging versions of all the package and it has
been discuted/specified: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AutomatedProblemReports
It would be really nice to get some work done on that but it seems
that's not a priority for now.

Your statements are not exactly true, some notes on that:
- non debug backtrace are usually better than no bug (allow to find
duplicates on the distro or upstream by example, give an idea on where
the crash happen)
- common desktop libs/apps have -dbg version
- we don't not ask often to do a rebuild to the user (I usually upload
debug packages on my people.ubuntu.com page so users just have to dpkg
-i them)

Thanks for your interest in that :) Feel free to comment on the wiki
specification!



Cheers,

Sebastien Bacher