Re: -dbg packages; are they actually useful?
On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 6:17 AM, Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 03, 2009 at 10:25:06PM -0500, Theodore Tso wrote:
>
>> > I'm looking at my local mirror (slowly) update at the moment, and I've
>> > got to wondering: are the large -dbg packages actually really useful
>> > to anybody? I can't imagine that more than a handful of users ever
>> > install (to pick an example) the amarok-dbg packages, but we have
>> > multiple copies of a 70MB-plus .deb taking up mirror space and
>> > bandwidth. I can understand this for library packages, maybe, but for
>> > applications?
>
>> There are people working on ways of compressing the debuginfo
>> information, and I've been told they might have results within a
>> couple of months. Part of the problem is that depending on how the
>> package is built, the -dbg packages can be huge, so it makes the
>> cost/benefit ratio somewhat painful.
>
>> If the -dbg files were more like these sizes:
>
>> 224 e2fslibs-dbg_1.41.3-1_i386.deb 52 libss2-dbg_1.41.3-1_i386.deb
>> 452 e2fsprogs-dbg_1.41.3-1_i386.deb 48 libuuid1-dbg_1.41.3-1_i386.deb
>> 76 libblkid1-dbg_1.41.3-1_i386.deb 48 uuid-runtime-dbg_1.41.3-1_i386.deb
>> 44 libcomerr2-dbg_1.41.3-1_i386.deb
>
>> I doubt there's be too much concern....
>
> Remaining concerns:
>
> - each of these dbg packages requires manual modification to the source
> package (incl. adding the package to debian/control)
> - each has to go through the NEW queue
> - each takes up space afterwards in the Packages file
>
> Much better if these can be generated centrally as part of the builds.
Yes like for instance http://debug.debian.net/ limited unfortunatly to
i386 and not up to date,
see also #508585. It is really important for us in order to get nice
bactrace. I maintain for instance imagemagick and it will be really
nice to ask user to do an apt-get debug imagemagick in order to get a
reliable backtrace. Moreover this operation should not be priveligied,
simple joe user should be able to use debug package.
Moreover, apt-get debugdepend imagemagick should also include debug
package for dependancies of imagemagick in case of crash in library
used by imagemagick.
And a script like ddebug could ease user report. For instance the user
will do ddebug imagemagick
and the script will get a backstrace and generate a bug report.
Regards
Bastien
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