[Soc-coordination] Debug packages progress report - week 6

[Emilio Pozuelo Monfort]

Hi folks,

I've advanced a lot these two weeks on my project. Here's what I've done and
what are the plans for the next couple of weeks.

Done:

As I wanted to have some working to begin with, I hacked on debhelper. My perl
sucks, but I managed to create a (very ugly) patch so that debhelper packages
would automagically build a .ddeb package. After that, I repeated it but in a
very less ugly (I would even say good) way. Also I've patched CDBS so that CDBS
using debhelper.mk would also get a .ddeb without any efforts. Then I patched
lintian to check .ddeb packages, and debc/debi to process/install .ddeb files.

Yesterday I built gcc-snapshot with --enable-linker-build-id, need to report
bugs/submit patches for gcc to build with -Wl,--build-id if the linker supports
it (the support is only in gcc-snapshot, not in gcc 3.4 or older).

I also investigated on how to get the Build ID from a binary. I thought getting
the whole note would do, but I was mistaken as the note contains not only the
"data", but also some more info, so I need to parse that. As that sounds a bit
error-prone, I've found the pbuildid program from OpenSuSE that outputs the
Build ID for the binary you pass to it. I'll probably package and use that one
(it has minimal dependencies, only libpopt, libelf and libc).

I mailed the ftpmasters and the wanna-build team with the outline asking for
comments and if everything is fine from their side or if they have any concern.

Plans for the next two weeks:

- Make sure everything's fine from the ftpmasters (and wanna-build, just in
  case), or if it's not, discuss it and change whatever is needed.
- Look at the dak code and patch it to do what we need it to do.
- Get gcc to pass -Wl,--build-id by default, or ld to use --build-id
- Get the debhelper and CDBS maintainers to look into my patches and tell me how
  much they suck!
- Make dh_strip ship debugging symbols in the build-id debug path for the
  binaries that have a build id.
- Investigate how binNMUs are performed and whether they will need changes to
  cope with .ddebs in the rebuilds or not.
- Look at adding python/mono support to debhelper/dh_strip

That should keep me busy for a while!

Best regards,
Emilio

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