Bug#365349: linux-image-*-dbg for squeeze?

[John Wright <jsw@debian.org>]

Hi kernel team,

(Cc-ing -devel to get more eyes on the subject, since I'm soliciting
ideas here...  See [1] for some context.)

What would it take to get kernel debuginfo into squeeze?  As I
understand it, the main blockers were [2]:

 1) It would blow up the archive by ~10 GB
     - This is a lot of space, but I believe it's worth it for crash
       dump and systemtap support.
 2) It would increase the buildd disk requirements as well.  Bastion
    gave a 30 GB figure, given 8 flavors in a particular architecture.
     - Do we have that many flavors for any arch now?)
     - Do we have buildd's that are this low on disk space?  Couldn't we
       upgrade them?

I haven't tried to see if my patch still applies against the current
linux-2.6 packaging.  If I made sure it still worked (submitting a new
patch if necessary, of course), would you consider accepting it?

Another alternative would be to turn on the CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO and
CONFIG_KPROBES options, but strip the kernel and modules, but at least
provide some script a user could run to rebuild the kernel with the same
options and compiler to get the debug symbols.  Or maybe upload the
debuginfo packages to a separate archive?  There was some discussion
about a large data archive a few years ago, and Joerg mentioned in May
2008 that such an archive setup was only a couple weeks out [3].  But I
haven't heard anything since then...

And then there's debug.debian.net - but I suspect that to get kernel
debug symbols into there would require changes both to linux-2.6 and the
scripts that service uses.

Any opinions?  Suggestions?

 [1]: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=365349
 [2]: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=365349#138
 [3]: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/05/msg00970.html

-- 
John Wright <jsw@debian.org>