-dbgsym

[David Farning]

On Wed, 2007-02-28 at 21:08 -0600, Freddy Martinez wrote:
> Excuse my ignorance but what does -dbgsyms do for us? This is the
> first time I have ever heard of it.

When you run apport-retrace -d, -retrace attempts to go out and grab a
-dbgsym file for each package touched in the retrace.  The -dbgsym file
contain all of the debugging symbols need to complete a retrace.

We are the first team to use and abuse apport so deeply and end up
finding many new bugs;)

In this case the Ubuntu build system creates the -dbgsym files
automatically.  Martin Pitt has a script the pulls out the -dbgsym files
and stores them in his repo.

The problem that we are attempting to solve here is:

There can be a number of delays before we run a retrace on a crash
reports.  -retrace must be able to find the same -dbgsym files of the
same version as the original reporter has installed.

If a new version of a package had been pushed through the build system
the old -dbgsym files were deleted.  This resulted in a bunch of file
not found messages while running -retrace and a bunch of symbol not
found errors in the retraced stacktraces.

Now, we will have 14 day to run the retraces before the the -dbgsym
files will be deleted.

It won't really help in the case of edgy crashes, but it should help
with new feisty crashes.


-- 
David Farning <dfarning at gmail.com>