[Soc-coordination] Fwd: Re: Debian debug packages project

[Emilio Pozuelo Monfort]

[ Copying debian-wb-team and soc-coordination; this is about a GSoC proposal to
automatically create debug packages ]

I've put the proposal at
http://wiki.debian.org/EmilioPozueloMonfort/GSoC2009Ddebs, but expect that to
change and be expanded

Marc Brockschmidt wrote:
> I'm not sure how much work porting apport would be. The actual software
> is already available and I don't think it needs a lot of changes - but
> setting the service up might require quite a bit of time.

We would need to integrate it with ddebs.debian.org (should be easy), and with
debbugs if we want to use it to submit bugs and/or crashes. There is the
retracing service too, but for that we would need servers for each arch running
the retracers, which take the coredumps from somewhere (possibly from debbugs),
which doesn't sound right since we don't want to make coredumps publicly
available. So for now we can leave the retracing services out. There is the
possibility to add an option to apport to download the ddebs packages to retrace
a core dump locally, that would solve the privacy issue.


Another good idea would be to grow a 'debug' option to apt-get (like the
'source' option) that installs the ddebs for the given packages (possibly for
dependencies too).


There's an issue I didn't think about before. If we make the ddebs creation as a
special thing in the buildds (as Ubuntu does, dpkg-diverting dh_strip), we have
the problem that for DDs uploads we would be missing ddeb packages, e.g. I
upload foobar_1.0-1_i386.changes, when it's autobuilt on amd64 ddebs will be
created, but not for i386.

One possible solution would be to stop allowing binary uploads ;) ISTR there are
plans to allow/require sourceful uploads, not sure if that's the case. If it
was, the problem would be moot. If this is the plan for the future, but won't
happen anytime soon, we can ignore binary uploads, and only create ddebs for
packages built in the buildds, until that time comes when everybody does
sourceful uploads. This is not ideal though, in case that takes a long time.

Another possibility would be to add multiarchive support to dak, and make the
ddebs creation part of the normal packages build. That way when you build foobar
and upload it to Debian, you have built the ddebs and upload them to incoming
together with everything else. But that doesn't sound like a great solution to me...

Any ideas on how to solve this?

Cheers,
Emilio

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