Re: Bug#396365: please add a gdb .udeb, for easier debugging inside d-i

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Tue, Oct 31, 2006 at 09:05:26AM -0500, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 31, 2006 at 01:06:12PM +0100, Sven Luther wrote:
> > A version of gdb as .udeb, which could easily be loaded inside the d-i would
> > be very useful for developers. This would come in handy to debug various bugs
> > which are otherwise hard to track, like crashes in the graphical installer,
> > or problems like i am having right now, in parted/libparted, which only are
> > apparent inside the d-i environment.
> 
> Is this really a good idea?  It seems like the wrong way round; you
> could manually load a full GDB and associated libraries, if you need
> it for debugging, but having it as part of a d-i image would e.g.
> change the required bits of libraries.

Mmm, you mean the mklibs'ed library in the standard image, i hadn't thought of
that. 

My idea was not to include it by default, but to be able to load it in the
ramdisk, if needed, so as a .udeb in the archive, but *NOT* as part of the d-i
image.

So, i am not entirely sure how d-i handles the case at hand here, where
libraries are part of the actual image, but symbols are removed during
reduction, because they are not needed by the .udebs in the image, but they
are needed by .udebs loaded later on.

My impression is that d-i loads the full libraries later on, or something
such.

In any case if you have a better idea on how to do this, maybe having a
statically built gdb, it would be welcome too.

> Hoping for feedback.

Hope this helps.

Friendly,

Sven Luther