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Re: Mandatory -dbg packages



On Sun, 2012-10-28 at 11:35 +0100, Bernhard R. Link wrote:
> * Philip Ashmore <contact@philipashmore.com> [121028 09:12]:
> > Yeah, in (cough)Fedora, kdbg even offers to download and install
> > debug packages for you.
> > Debug packages also make back-traces more than useless, and
> > (cough)Ubuntu offers to download debug packages which it installs
> > and re-examines the back-trace to see if more are needed.
> 
> While having some way to get the stripped debug info from the installed
> packages is nice to more easily get some debug information or to
> retroactively make a backtrace a bit more verbose, it is still not
> enough for all cases of debugging. Ideal debugging information you get
> by locally rebuilding the needed libraries with
> DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS="noopt nostrip" and installing those.
> (Sadly not all libraries support noopt, but it's getting much better as a
> side effect of the current hardening effords).

There are plenty of bugs that involve 'undefined behaviour' that in
practice depends on whether optimisation is enabled.  Unless you have a
good idea what's going wrong, how do you know that 'noopt' won't hide
the bug?  Also, gdb and the GNU toolchain have recently got a lot better
at handling highly optimised code (tracking variables in registers,
treating inlined functions as logically separate functions, etc.).

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings
Reality is just a crutch for people who can't handle science fiction.

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