Anyone wants to do an debug repository?

Vamp898 · 2013-12-14 10:56:51

Does anyone want help me to create an repository with debug symbols?

Seems like Archlinux Maintainers wont provide that and a typical crash in KDE needs a rebuild of about 20 packages without the strip option and with the next update, they all are useless again.

So in fact its kinda impossible to have debug flags and everything provided is as far away from KISS as absolutely possible.

Over day time my Computer is running idle (16GB RAM, 8x3,6 GHz FX8150) so i would have enough time to compile all day long, but thats not enough to provide a debug repository as you may have guessed

Does anyone maybe already done something smiliar or want to help in general with additional CPU power or stuff like that?

Last edited by Vamp898 (2013-12-14 10:57:04)

blackout23 · 2013-12-15 10:29:47

I second this. I'd love to be able to provide better bug reports to upstream. I even thought about at least switching my laptop to Gentoo for this but Arch is just too nice.

The last thing I read about debug symbols was this from Allan:

I think the reason it hasn’t been accepted so far is that no one has written a good clean portable way of doing it. Seems someone was close but then dropped it.
https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/10975
Seems like a very similar situation to package signing.
(Allan, is your TODO list public by any chance?)

Allan wrote:

Correct… the implementation basically just needs a bit polishing up to be applied. It just continuously gets pushed down the list of things I want to fix by more important/interesting issues…
The majority of my TODO list is in the bug tracker or the pacman roadmap in the Arch wiki.

http://allanmcrae.com/2012/08/are-we-re … rch-linux/

Last edited by blackout23 (2013-12-15 14:19:30)

Allan · 2013-12-15 11:05:27

That is very old... makepkg can now create split debug symbol packages.

blackout23 · 2013-12-15 14:26:27

So is the longer compiletime really what keeps the Arch developers from builinding everything with splitdebug or are there other issues?

Vamp898 · 2013-12-15 16:51:41

The shouldnt be any noticable change in compile time.

When i compile my packages in Gentoo with or without splitdebug, even at LibreOffice, its maybe a second difference or something like that.

Allan · 2013-12-15 22:36:04

There is no difference in compile time. The issue is that our repo handling scripts can not handle debug packages at the moment.

aplund · 2014-01-29 04:42:19

Is there any movement on this? It is very frustrating having core dumps but not knowing what they mean!

Allan · 2014-01-29 05:19:43

No - no-one has stepped up to deal with it.

blackout23 · 2014-01-31 17:24:57

Maybe this issue just needs more visibility with a brief explanation of what would need to be done where and why. I think many reading this (myself included) don't understand why debug packages have to be handled differently in the repo. Or are you thinking of something link linux-dbg, mesa-dbg which has its own [debug] repo? Couldn't they be the same packages in the same repo? My dev skills aren't up to the task so I'd award 100 € to the person who gets the job done. Not kidding here.

Scimmia · 2014-01-31 17:27:13

The repo databases are large already, adding the debug packages directly would double that.

blackout23 · 2014-01-31 17:44:19

Scimmia wrote:

The repo databases are large already, adding the debug packages directly would double that.

That's why I thought they could just be replaced.

Lekensteyn · 2014-02-01 17:32:39

If needed, I have an i7-3770 with 24GB RAM for compiling. Compiling kdebase-workspace 4.11.5-1 with debug option enabled took 10m7s with -j16. with quite some time spent on compressing the package. (When I compiled with -g appended to CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS, without options=(debug), it took only 6 minutes and 37 seconds). (Both are excluding the download time for sources and dependencies installation)

kdelibs 4.12.1-1 with debug took 13m15s (xz is again very slow..)

Notes:

Adding the "debug" option adds "-g -fvar-tracking-assignments" which only adds an additional section to an object, it does not touch the code section.
The generated binaries will be different to the ones without the debug option specified as the BuildID is different. Instead of using md5sum for comparison, use objdump -d foo (or -D for all sections, including the debug sections)
If the code section differs anyway, check whether one of the package enabled additional features due to having extra dependencies installed that got detected during cmake or configure.
Arch uses something that has /build/ as build directory.

I must be doing something wrong (dependencies?) as there are still a lot of differences between the repo files and my generated files:

usr/lib/libkcmutils.so.4.12.1: 432 lines
usr/lib/libkde3support.so.4.12.1: 11896 lines
usr/lib/libkdeclarative.so.5.12.1: 55 lines
usr/lib/libkdecore.so.5.12.1: 25081 lines
usr/lib/libkdeinit4_kbuildsycoca4.so: 2624 lines
usr/lib/libkdeinit4_kded4.so: 83 lines
usr/lib/libkdeinit4_kio_http_cache_cleaner.so: 275 lines
usr/lib/libkdeinit4_klauncher.so: 164 lines
usr/lib/libkdesu.so.5.12.1: 460 lines
usr/lib/libkdeui.so.5.12.1: 49465 lines
usr/lib/libkdewebkit.so.5.12.1: 110 lines
usr/lib/libkdnssd.so.4.12.1: 22 lines
usr/lib/libkemoticons.so.4.12.1: 60 lines
usr/lib/libkfile.so.4.12.1: 5656 lines
usr/lib/libkhtml.so.5.12.1: 967816 lines
usr/lib/libkidletime.so.4.12.1: 115 lines
usr/lib/libkimproxy.so.4.12.1: 38 lines
usr/lib/libkio.so.5.12.1: 38691 lines
usr/lib/libkjsapi.so.4.12.1: 20 lines
usr/lib/libkjsembed.so.4.12.1: 13999 lines
usr/lib/libknewstuff2.so.4.12.1: 537 lines
usr/lib/libknewstuff3.so.4.12.1: 8701 lines
usr/lib/libkparts.so.4.12.1: 2804 lines
usr/lib/libkprintutils.so.4.12.1: 92 lines
usr/lib/libkpty.so.4.12.1: 89 lines
usr/lib/libkrossui.so.4.12.1: 1006 lines
usr/lib/libktexteditor.so.4.12.1: 61 lines
usr/lib/libkunitconversion.so.4.12.1: 6331 lines
usr/lib/libkunittest.so.4.12.1: 38 lines
usr/lib/libnepomukquery.so.4.12.1: 2889 lines
usr/lib/libnepomuk.so.4.12.1: 12174 lines
usr/lib/libnepomukutils.so.4.12.1: 1642 lines
usr/lib/libplasma.so.3.0.0: 58606 lines
usr/lib/libsolid.so.4.12.1: 28339 lines

Last edited by Lekensteyn (2014-02-01 18:37:55)

Snowman · 2014-02-01 21:40:46

Lekensteyn wrote:

If needed, I have an i7-3770 with 24GB RAM for compiling. Compiling kdebase-workspace 4.11.5-1 with debug option enabled took 10m7s with -j16. with quite some time spent on compressing the package. (When I compiled with -g appended to CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS, without options=(debug), it took only 6 minutes and 37 seconds). (Both are excluding the download time for sources and dependencies installation)
kdelibs 4.12.1-1 with debug took 13m15s (xz is again very slow..)

If the packages are to be used locally, you don't need to compress them. that will save you some time.

Lekensteyn wrote:

Notes:
Adding the "debug" option adds "-g -fvar-tracking-assignments" which only adds an additional section to an object, it does not touch the code section.
The generated binaries will be different to the ones without the debug option specified as the BuildID is different. Instead of using md5sum for comparison, use objdump -d foo (or -D for all sections, including the debug sections)
If the code section differs anyway, check whether one of the package enabled additional features due to having extra dependencies installed that got detected during cmake or configure.
Arch uses something that has /build/ as build directory.

The packages in the repos are build in a clean chroot. See extra-x86_64-build in devtools package.

Last edited by Snowman (2014-02-01 21:41:03)

kenny3794 · 2014-04-08 01:29:17

Has anyone done anything with this? I'm having an issue now with gnome-shell, open source Radeon drivers and X server. Would be nice to not have to rebuild the entire graphics stack....

Vamp898 · 2014-04-08 05:15:10

Nope, I just switched to my gentoo box for such stuff

aplund · 2014-12-03 01:37:54

I'm still keen to get some useful debugging symbols on my machines. I am able to do this on a case by case basis by rebuilding packages out of ABS. I'm not super keen to run a local repo just for my own debugging, but if that is the only way then I guess I will have to do this.

davidm · 2014-12-18 15:26:02

I just ran into this myself. I just submitted a bug report upstream regarding a segfault in Dolphin. Of course they request a good backtrace which is not very easy to do under Arch AFAICT.

I know it takes WORK to do this kind of stuff but I just wanted to voice that I'm with the others that it would be a good idea. It seems most other distros have ways of making it easier but the KDE project (I was directed to this document by a bug triager) has this to say regarding Arch:

Arch
Arch currently doesn't offer debug packages with symbols (Feature Request). You therefore need to recompile all concerned packages with debugging symbols. See their informative document Getting Traces.

https://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tu … ports#Arch

Last edited by davidm (2014-12-18 15:26:34)

davidm · 2014-12-19 22:09:19

I'm thinking about trying my hand with this to try to help a bit.

Would it make sense to say have a special KDE repo with the debugging symbols included? This would include all the KDE packages along with QT and whatever else is commonly needed to get useful backtraces. Then we would set up a user repo or a repo of some sort and to use it you would simply have to place it temporarily above the other repos in your pacman.conf or such. To disable it you simply comment out or remove the debugging repo and then update. Or you could just install a few select ones like kdelibs and the misbehaving application also I suppose.

Does this seem like a feasible plan?

The issues would seem to be keeping it current. I would be willing to try my hand with it for KDE and x86_64 packages (maybe x86 later too) but might need some technical help/advice getting started if someone would be willing to allow me to bother them about it if I get stuck.

edit: just wanted to say I won't be able to attempt this after all. I've decided to switch distros for the time being. It is a worthy project however and I wish luck with it to anyone willing.

Last edited by davidm (2014-12-23 01:00:59)

tesfabpel · 2016-12-22 11:26:22

Sorry to bump this thread, but why arch devs aren't willing to create official repos named Debug, Community-Debug, Extra-Debug, Multilib-Debug?
It should also help them when developing or debugging things in testing, etc... and it would also ease us when creating crash reports (every crash report for KDE software is rated as useless on Arch because it misses debug symbols, sadly)...

Thanks

ewaller · 2016-12-22 15:08:28

Clearly because they are lazy. Closing this ancient thread before it passes the event horizon of the bikeshed

Arch Linux

#1 2013-12-14 10:56:51

Anyone wants to do an debug repository?

#2 2013-12-15 10:29:47

Re: Anyone wants to do an debug repository?

#3 2013-12-15 11:05:27

Re: Anyone wants to do an debug repository?

#4 2013-12-15 14:26:27

Re: Anyone wants to do an debug repository?

#5 2013-12-15 16:51:41

Re: Anyone wants to do an debug repository?

#6 2013-12-15 22:36:04

Re: Anyone wants to do an debug repository?

#7 2014-01-29 04:42:19

Re: Anyone wants to do an debug repository?

#8 2014-01-29 05:19:43

Re: Anyone wants to do an debug repository?

#9 2014-01-31 17:24:57

Re: Anyone wants to do an debug repository?

#10 2014-01-31 17:27:13

Re: Anyone wants to do an debug repository?

#11 2014-01-31 17:44:19

Re: Anyone wants to do an debug repository?

#12 2014-02-01 17:32:39

Re: Anyone wants to do an debug repository?

#13 2014-02-01 21:40:46

Re: Anyone wants to do an debug repository?

#14 2014-04-08 01:29:17

Re: Anyone wants to do an debug repository?

#15 2014-04-08 05:15:10

Re: Anyone wants to do an debug repository?

#16 2014-12-03 01:37:54

Re: Anyone wants to do an debug repository?

#17 2014-12-18 15:26:02

Re: Anyone wants to do an debug repository?

#18 2014-12-19 22:09:19

Re: Anyone wants to do an debug repository?

#19 2016-12-22 11:26:22

Re: Anyone wants to do an debug repository?

#20 2016-12-22 15:08:28

Re: Anyone wants to do an debug repository?

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