A way to provide ddebs to landing PPA:s?

[Timo Jyrinki]

pete-woods asked for a general feature to be able to install full debug symbols for packages in PPA:s.

This could be enabled via LP infra people quite easily, but in the past it was then problematic at the point the packages would be tried to be copied to the archives.

This bug is therefore a request to think of a way to provide the ddebs without causing any problems.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

We've had a much better implementation in Launchpad for ages, but deploying it has been blocked on having enough space in the librarian, which was blocked on a migration to Swift. This is almost complete now, at which point it should be possible for us to do a much better job here.

Since this is probably only weeks away, I don't think it's a good use of time for the landing team to try to invent a workaround.

[Michi Henning (michihenning)]

We currently have a fix for a critical issue that we can't land because the code segfaults on the phone. The same code tests fine on CI on all architectures. Looking at the crash dump, all we get are anonymous stack frames, but no debug symbols, which makes it very hard to get even a rough idea what's happening.

We have a testing infrastructure that we need to pass, yet, when something core dumps, we can't get at the debug symbols. Catch 22…

I'm not looking for an immediate fix. But I really need a way to get the debug symbols for that PPA (any way, even if it's cumbersome).

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

People with access to germanium and some other Launchpad-related machines can extract the ddebs manually from the buildd over HTTP, as long as the buildd hasn't been reinstalled since the build happened (which does sometimes happen). I'll extract these ones for you.

[Michi Henning (michihenning)]

Thanks for your help, Colin! I'll try and get those debug symbols installed tomorrow and see what I can learn.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

New-style ddebs are now enabled for the primary Ubuntu archive and for all landing silos, among others. I think there's separate work going on to allow apport-retrace to fetch this automatically, but in the meantime you can just fetch the ddebs from the build pages on Launchpad now for anything built after the switch.