Proposed F18 feature: MiniDebugInfo

[Jiri Moskovcak]

On 05/07/2012 03:07 PM, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> I just wrote a new Feature proposal for shipping minimal debug info by
> default:
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/MiniDebugInfo
>
> The feature page lists some of the background and statistics. It also
> lists some options in how to implement this, which all have various
> different pros and cons. I'd like to hear what peoples opinions on these
> are.
>
> My personal opinion is that we should go with compressed data, in the
> original files without the line number information. This means we use
> minimal space (i.e. an installation increase by only 0.5%) while being
> completely transparent to users. It does however make the normal
> packages larger in a non-optional way which some people disagree with.
>
>

There is so many questions and opinions in this thread I can't just 
reply to all of them, so I'll try to sum it here:

The privacy concerns: yes, uploading corefile might be dangerous, that's 
why there is the other possibility of downloading the debuginfo and 
generating the backtrace locally, but as it seems many users trust us 
and use the retrace server as you can see from the stats: 
http://retrace.fedoraproject.org/stats

Appart from that I see two questions here:
1. Whether to add the minidebuginfo in Fedora
2. Whether to use this stripped backtrace when reporting a bug.


For 1: The decision to use it or not should be based on some real-life 
tests like "how it impacts the current gnome/kde live cd" or other 
spins. If the additional payload is really small then I don't see a 
problem here (but I'm glad the decision is not mine ;))

For 2: At this point (F18 timeframe) probably not. From ABRT point of 
view the minidebug is not a problem at all if we can use gdb to generate 
some backtrace using the mindebuginfo. But what matters are developers 
who will need to deal with this stripped backtrace and I can guarantee 
that there will be many unhappy devels. And also the ABRT server 
projects rely on the coredumps: 
http://git.fedorahosted.org/git?p=abrt.git;a=blob_plain;f=doc/project/abrt.pdf;hb=HEAD 
And once put into life these server side projects will be a great help 
in bugfixing.

As for the bandwidth limitations when using ABRT - I hope Lennart's core 
stripping library might help here.

--Jirka