Bugfixing of debugging symbols in Fedora
Many components in Fedora and RHEL have broken debuginfo
packages. We detect and report all significant debuginfo issues on
Fedora Rawhide packages to Red Hat Bugzilla, explaining maintainers
the cause of the issues and a way how to fix them.
Reason for existence
Issues this project is addressing:
- Many components in Fedora and RHEL have broken debuginfo
packages: debugging symbols for a binary are missing in the
debuginfo package because binary is stripped during build,
binaries remain unstripped, symlinks from debuginfo to binaries
are broken, source code files are missing from debuginfo
packages.
- Broken debuginfo packages affect ABRT crash report
quality. Every application using a library without debugging
symbols gets lower rating of backtrace, which results in crash not
being reported.
- Broken debuginfo packages affect the ability to support
software.
- Retrace server depends on symlinks pointing from the debuginfo
package to a binary in a subpackage. When the symlink is missing
or incorrect, retrace server fails to generate good
backtrace.
Objectives
- Report all significant debuginfo issues on Fedora Rawhide
packages to Red Hat Bugzilla, explaining maintainers the cause of
the issues and a way how to fix them.
- Help maintainers with fixing the issues.
- Offer integrating the service into rpmdiff tool to catch
regressions.
Outcomes
- faf-chroot
- Rewrite it to use libsolv for dependency resolution.
- Libsolv usage results in higher rebuild success rate.
- faf-debuginfo-report-bugzilla
- Improved description of the issues, based on previous
feedback.
- optimize faf network and Koji usage so it can be run
automatically
- allow deploying it on a server, documentation
- later also start reporting less serious issues
People
- Team: Karel Klíč
- Interests: Andrew Hecox
- Send information to: Jirka Moskovčák, Radek Vokál
Timeline
- Project start date: 2011-12-01
- Planned finish date: 2012-04-30
Milestones
- 2012-01-11 Wed
- Feature is submitted to Fedora 17 Features.
- 2012-02-01 Wed
- Fedora feature freeze. Bugs are filed to Red Hat Bugzilla.
Diary
- 2011-11-10
- A subprojects defined in
faf: Debuginfo
issue checker for Fedora. Planned to be finished
2012-04-30.
Risks
Low priority. If other projects will be slowed down, this project
will be slipped.
Dependencies
Package maintainers to fix the reported issues.
Faf receives bugfixing and
improvements.
Contingency plan
If many bugs remain unfixed for Fedora 17, they will be fixed for
Fedora 18.
Documentation
The developed tool was already run on RHEL 6.2.
Debugging symbols capture the information about which programming
language constructs generated specific machine code in a
binary. This information can be used to generate a backtrace from a
core dump, and it helps developers to debug application crashes.
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