Re: How to troubleshoot aptitude segfaults ?

[David Corking <lists@dcorking.com>]

On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 2:48 PM, Daniel Burrows wrote:

>  I was going to suggest installing aptitude-dbg, but...
>
>  ...do you mean etch or lenny?

Yes - I mean etch (4.0).  I upgraded that server to etch a long time
ago, then put up with a broken aptitude for a long time without
investigating deeply (can't afford much downtime.)  It seemed to be a
good idea to try to fix it before attempting an overnight upgrade to
lenny.

> If you really mean etch, then
> aptitude-dbg is not available.  You'll have to run apt-get source to
> fetch the aptitude source and then compile it with debugging symbols.
> (./configure && make should do the trick, once you install the
> build-deps)

Thanks!  Once I have a debuggable binary, which trace or dump do you need?

What would you say to this alternative?
1 - upgrade to lenny with (apt-get upgrade, apt-get dist-upgrade)
2 - run aptitude.  If still not working,
3 - apt-get aptitude-dbg  and try to get a trace or core dump for you
with the debug symbols

Would I end up with lots of undeleted orphaned packages?

Best, David