A way to get debug symbols

[Ilya Fedin]

In tdesktop, we regularly deal with a situation when someone reports a crash in the snap package, but can't reproduce it with others distribution methods (static binary, flatpak), this makes literally impossible to debug the crash as snap doesn't have any infrastructure for debug symbols, so we suggest those users to switch to other distribution methods. I thought it would appear with time, but a lot of years passed and there's no sign such work is going on, hence I'm reporting this. It's currently the biggest our problem with snap that makes it the most discouraged official distribution method.

I see three ways out of this:

1. Make some system that would allow us to set a command to split the debug symbols and download them from Launchpad/build.snapcraft.io (we use the first one for stable releases as it's the only way for automatic propagation to the stable channel). This would allow us to use breakpad that we use for the static binary, so the users will have a GUI crash report window allowing to send the crash report to developer who can then inspect the crash with debug symbols he downloaded from Launchpad.

2. Automatically split debug symbols and create debug packages like Flatpak does. That would mean the user has to install them and manually get backtrace with gdb.

3. Create custom crash report system that would automatically split debug symbols, upload them to the server, snapd would intercept the crashes and open its own crash report window where the user can send the crash report to Snap's crash report server where snap package's developer would be able to get the backtrace or the dump with debug symbols using some web UI, CLI or API.

[Sergio Schvezov (sergiusens)]

This is actively being worked on (design phase)