Proposed F18 feature: MiniDebugInfo

[Alexander Larsson]

On Mon, 2012-05-07 at 23:54 +0200, Jan Kratochvil wrote:
> On Mon, 07 May 2012 23:36:04 +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:

> > But anyway, I don't think it's worth continuing this discussion, this is
> > a bit like a dialogue between two wet towels...
> 
> I also do not think we can ever find an agreement.  I only wanted to post here
> the opposite side of oppinions on this formal feature request.

I think this is the one thing we can agree on.

>> With Alex' work you need very very little working, just a small unwinder.
> 
> Yes, just an unwinder.  Not backtrace for debugging the problem.

This is your opinion. I rarely need the full backtrace in a bug report,
because it you can get one its generally something thats easily
reproduced and I can just run it in gdb myself. When you need it is when
something weird is happening and you have to rely on the bugreport only.
This is sometimes doable even without debug info, I even wrote a blog
post about this:

http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2005/08/26/the-art-of-decoding-backtraces-without-debug-info/

But, having the full symbol names for all libraries and apps in all
backtraces I'll ever see in the future would help me immensely. Even if
its "just an unwinder".

> > I am pretty sure I don't want my local developer machine always talk to
> > the fedora server
> 
> Again, as a developer you can affort several GBs of debuginfo.

Not only developers are interested in backtraces, and not only on their
development machine. Administrators are too, and developers are
interested in backtraces from live systems in deployment etc. It just
makes more sense to have solid reliable client side backtraces.