[Fwd: Re: Problems with debug packages on ubuntu 9.10 karmic]

[Thomas Mittelstaedt <tmstaedt at t-mittelstaedt dot de>]

Hallo, gdb experts,

I just had a crash of firefox on ubuntu 9.10 karmic and a tool called 
apport-bug came up automatically to collect system information, among it
a stack trace, which again contained no debugging symbols. Well, for 
some package like xulrunner, there were indeed no debugging symbols, but
for libglib, for instance, they definitely existed. I had the same
problems with my own build of gnome evolution and I helped myself by
using "set sysroot <non-existent-dir>; set solib-search-path=...".
How can I make sure that gdb picks up the symbols of libraries already
loaded? I am running a recent cvs version of gdb 7.0.
Thank you in advance for insights / clarifications!


-------- Weitergeleitete Nachricht --------
> Von: Thomas Mittelstaedt <tmstaedt@t-mittelstaedt.de>
> Reply-to: tmstaedt@t-mittelstaedt.de
> An: ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com
> Betreff: Re: Problems with debug packages on ubuntu 9.10 karmic
> Datum: Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:57:52 +0100
> 
> Am Montag, den 08.02.2010, 05:06 +0100 schrieb Thomas Mittelstaedt:
> > Hallo,
> > 
> > I have problems producing bug reports containing backtraces with all
> > debug symbols. Even though I do have the dbg packages installed, gdb 7
> > doesn't pick them up automatically, neither for an installed app like 
> > rhythmbox nor for a custom build of gnome evolution.
> > The non-stripped libraries get installed under /usr/lib/debug and I
> > tried to use add-symbol-file, to load the symbols. And this procedure
> > would only be partly successful, i.e. in the backtrace, some function
> > calls of a library would show nicely while others would be just the
> > usual '???'.
> > 
> > See https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=606881 and
> > https://bugzilla.gnome.org/page.cgi?id=trace.html&trace_id=220468.
> > 
> > Any help appreciated!
> > 
> > 
> > -- 
> > thomas
> > 
> 
> Well, to answer my own question.
> I used the following to load some (not all) symbols of 
> the debug version of the libraries via:
> 
> (gdb) set sysroot foo # set sysroot to non-existent directory
> (gdb) set solib-search-path /usr/lib/debug/:/usr/lib/debug/lib:...<other
> paths>
> 
> Looks like gdb does not descent recursively into /usr/lib/debug, e.g.
> for the debug version of /lib/libglib-2.0.so.0 to get its debug
> information loaded, I had to add 
> /usr/lib/debug/lib to solib-search-path.
> 
> See also in the gdb info documentation
> "18.2 Debugging Information in Separate Files"
> 

-- 
thomas