Advice on how to debug build issues on S390x etc

[David Mohammed]

Hi all,

  I have been looking a little more closely as to why geary [1]  has
not been promoted to the eoan-release pocket.  It is due to a number
of build test failures for the S390X and ppc64el architectures [2][3].

Working with the geary maintainer [4] and using the upstream git
master [5] there are two remaining issues - a Glib memory exhaustion
issue and webkit crashes.

The maintainer has suggested that to progress this further will need
backtraces for the crashes - somehow invoking gdb from the package
rules - tests and outputting the gdb results to the build log file.

> If you don't have interactive access to one of the build hosts, the easiest way to get the traces may well be to update the rules file so that when tests are run, ensure generate core files are generated on process crash, then run gdb over them to get it to print a stack trace.
>
> There's some info about debugging WebProcess crashes over here: https://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKitGTK/Debugging


Question- is this possible?  If so - how?  Any examples that anyone can share?

If not - suggestions on the way forward?

TIA

David

[1] https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/geary/3.32.0-1
[2] https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/geary/3.32.0-1/+build/16663992
[3] https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/geary/3.32.0-1/+build/16663991
[4] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/geary/issues/512
[5] https://launchpad.net/~ubuntubudgie-dev/+archive/ubuntu/geary-test