Thanks for your response, Niels, On Thu, 10 Aug 2017, Niels Thykier wrote: > > BTW, in some discussions some other questions were raised: > > > > - Is it really a good idea that foo-dbgsym depends on "foo (== > > foo-version)"? Wouldn't a Conflict or breaks on "foo (!= foo-version)" > > make more sense respective package? Consider that you want to analyze the > > core dump on a different system and foo may pull in quite a lot of > > dependencies, start servers, etc. > > > > could be debugging coredumps from multiple versions on the same > machine. As a debugger, you are basically interested in the > /usr/lib/debug files themselves and not the dbgsym.deb. > The .deb packages happen to be the only transport mechanism that > Debian provides, but we should consider that they limit people to > basically debugging on the same distribution as they are running (at > least if you want to dbg files for libc and other low level libraries).
Yes, I agree that being able to only download and unpack the packages into some directory should be available as an alternative. This would make root-access un-neccessary. In gdb, one can use 'set debug-file-directory' to a search patch with several directories. > Anyway, The relation was added for two reasons: > > * It was a "requirement" imposed to me when I wrote it from several > others. I presume that it was historical to match that of -dbg > packages > > * To make dbgsym packages trivially policy compliant (without > duplicating the copyright file), I used usr/share/doc symlinks. true, I hadn't thought about the copyright file. > > > - Is it allowed for packages that are not in the debug section to depend > > on packages in the debug section. [...] > > > > Not in Debian. The "main" component of the "debian" archive is > self-contained; the "debian-debug" archive is an add-on on top of this. > [...] > Largely, it is the technically similar to a package in main depending on > a package in non-free (except for the legal/ethical implications). ok > > - Would an option to put all symbols from a source package into a single > > dbgsym package make sense? This would allow to get rid of all those dbgsym > > packages with only a single small file in them. > > > > Technically, it should rather trivial if we ignore some corner cases. > Notably, the dbgsym would no longer be (bit-for-bit) reproducible under > "noX" profiles (that exclude packages). > > We might also have to replace the usr/share/doc symlink in favour of a > real copyright file (or assume that dbgsym packages cannot contain > copyrightable information / is not subject to license terms or define > that they inherit their license information from $SOMEWHERE). ok. That's probably not worth the effort, then. > > - Should we put the URL of the debug sym sources.list entry into the > > release file of the non-debug sym section? That way, apt could determine > > the location of the dbgsym packages by itself without having to edit > > sources.list. > I think that is an interesting idea and would go nicely hand in hand > with the request for other mirror metadata in #761348 (like what is the > base suite for "add-on suites" like experimental) thanks for the pointer. I have sent a comment to that bug report. Cheers, Stefan
