Missing crash reports for long-running processes

[Emilio Pozuelo Monfort]

Ted Gould wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-08-20 at 08:37 +0100, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
>> Of course, this particular bug report would have been suppressed anyway, because the
>> package was out of date,
> 
> If we're fixing issues with Apport, I think that's a bigger one.  I run
> Karmic, but I don't update everyday.  Probably once a week or two.  And
> basically if I get an Apport dialog I just close it as I know that my
> backtrace will probably get rejected as something inevitably changed.

This could be solved by using build ids and storing debug symbols on path
containing the build ids (basically a path that contains a hash in it, which
should be unique, e.g. /usr/lib/debug/.build-id/12/34567890abcdef.debug).

This way you can have multiple copies of debugging symbols for different
versions of the same binary, as now the path is different for each one of them
(as they would have different build ids).

I have a trivial patch for debhelper to place debugging symbols in a build id
path. Also GCC already adds build ids to the binaries, so going this way
shouldn't be hard.

> I do realized the impact of this and the amount of datacenter space it'd
> take to keep all the binaries.  But it's a source of frustration for me
> as it seems that Apport is only for people who update daily.

You could keep debugging symbols for e.g. the last 15 days, or some fixed amount
of days (depending on the disk space available).

Cheers,
Emilio

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