William A. Rowe, Jr. wrote: >After spending many hours reviewing and actively using debug symbols >for real customer incidents, I have formed some different opinions and >wanted to share. > >I'm convinced that with the Win32 debugging tools (free to download) >available today, there is exactly one benefit to .dbg files - Dr. Watson >on WinNT can display backtraces. It's already possible to display >those backtraces on the 98, ME, 2k and XP from .pdb files. That small >benefit against the broken .pdb <-> binaries isn't worth that aggravation. > >For me to collect the symbols from the public releases, into a symbols >store isn't possible today. The very act of rebase'ing (when extracting) >the .dbg files breaks the original association between each binary and >it's complete .pdb information file. > >The .dbg files are very lightweight flavors of (with much less info than) >the comprehensive .pdb files. Anyone on WinNT can simply use WinDbg >to bring up a crash dump created by Dr. Watson. At that point, it's trivial >to look at the stack backtrace (complete with arguments) which is much >richer than Dr. Watson provides by default. > >Of course a typical user won't understand either Dr. Watson or WinDbg, >but would be happy to forward a user.dmp file. The .dbg files add nothing >to what we get out of .pdb files in helping to triage such a report. > >So at this point, I'm ready to back out the .dbg file creation logic, leaving >the .pdb logic for complete analysis of crash dumps of any given ASF build >of the Apache releases. Unless anyone has any objection, I should get to >this later tomorrow afternoon. > >
This would get a big +1 from me. If I understand correctly, it would also make the size of statically linked apr-iconv .so modules much smaller, which is a Goodness. -- Brane Čibej <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.xbc.nu/brane/
