On Tue, Mar 03, 2009 at 03:11:12PM -0800, Don Armstrong wrote: > On Tue, 03 Mar 2009, Steve McIntyre wrote: > > I've got to wondering: are the large -dbg packages actually really > > useful to anybody?
> > Thoughts? > I think they are useful, but probably not for the vast majority of > users. [I've used them on a few dozen occasions.] There are 785 packages matching '*-dbg' in unstable on i386. 327 of them are for applications (well, !libraries). Does it really make sense to ship all of these in the archive if, out of the whole set, they're useful to people on "a few dozen occasions"? According to popcon[1], 433 of these packages have an install count of 10 or less; 616 have an install count of 30 or less.[2] For orphaned packages, these are the kinds of numbers where the QA team starts talking about removals. Granted, the numbers on -dbg packages are going to be lower because they're often installed just for debugging and then removed again, but I think we should seriously look at whether all these one-off debug builds are really justified, and whether they really belong as part of the main archive (and on all our mirrors). > What I really wish for is the ability to have a relatively centralized > location where the symbols from every single package ended up that was > separate from the normal mirrors. Yes, absolutely. Doing this right, though, requires integration with the buildd network, so that the debugging symbols can be extracted as part of the official build instead of being lossily reconstructed after the fact. > The above, coupled with a coredump submission site which would accept > coredumps and automatically generate backtraces for them (or a script > that downloaded the -dbg packages, unpacked them and backtraced the > coredump) would be a great help in debugging some of the relatively > rare segfaults. [We could probably even hook up a coredump handler to > such a script.] > There was some talk that Ubuntu was going to implement such a thing at > the Prague UDS, but I've no clue if it ever came to fruition. 'apport' in Ubuntu does exactly this (and has been in use since well before the Prague UDS); it hasn't really been worth evaluating for inclusion in Debian without first resolving the problem of lack of systematic debugging symbols. If there's a will to get that done in Debian now, I will definitely be happy to ditch the samba-dbg package for one. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org [1] Well, popcon also thinks there are 887 such packages, rather than 785; I guess there are some of these no longer in unstable. [2] Unfortunately, thanks to bug-buddy Recommending gnome-dbg, we also have almost 40 GNOME -dbg packages with greater popcon stats than libc6-dbg! -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org