Paul Wise <p...@debian.org> writes: > Not having anything to do with Ubuntu, I don't know anything about the > details, but they have had automatic debug packages and automated > crash report stuff for quite a while, a couple of years IIRC. The > specs for that are here: > > https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/apt-get-debug-symbols > https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/automated-problem-reports
Ah, thank you! https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AptElfDebugSymbols is the specification. It does use *.ddeb. There isn't any clear statement about how *.ddeb packages differ from *.deb packages. It looks like, by and large, they don't, except they may not need to contain the same set of things. The packages are not in debian/control or the things fed from it, but are in *.changes. Ubuntu is creating one debug package per binary package, as I and a few other people have said we prefer. However, they're using the gnu_debuglink method, not the id method, so they don't have the one problem with that method previously identified in this thread when the same binary is copied into multiple packages. The debug packages depend on the packages for which they have symbols, which solves the problem of not installing debug packages that both provide symbols for the same binary. The proposal appears to only work for packages using debhelper, although the steps are laid out so presumably they could be done manually if need be. Ubuntu uses -dbgsym as the magic namespace. I don't know if it would be good for us to do the same or to use a different namespace to avoid problems for them in cases where we decide to build the package manually via debian/control and debian/rules. It looks like the plan with *.ddeb is to treat them specially in the archive software and divert them into a different tree in the archive instead of using a separate archive area, which I think they're doing now from that page. It also looks like one of the justifications for the separate package is to hide them in the apt front-end so that users don't see all the additional packages. I'm personally skeptical this is a good idea, although I can see the merits of not returning them in apt-cache search. Ah, and it looks like the automated crash reporting offers to download the -dbgsym packages and install them. I don't see any sign in this of a share. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-policy-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
