Re: Anyone tried SystemTap with the latest RHEL5 Beta refresh

[Badari Pulavarty <pbadari at gmail dot com>]

On Wed, 2006-11-01 at 12:46 -0800, Keshavamurthy, Anil S wrote:

> Some of the difficulties that I see people face are
> 1) Debuginfo RPM is not part of the standard CD's or the partner released ISO's. If it is not part of the 
> standard CD, people are not going to google for debuginfo and install it. Also in the lab's where
> people debug the RHEL releases, accessing outside the corporate firewall is restricted and hence
> people can not google for the debuginfo rpm even if they want to.
>
> 2) When the kernel is updated via RHN, there is no automated way to update the 
> corresponding debuginfo RPM's as this is not available via RHN.
> 
> 3) Also for people who are willing to spare 300MB for installing debuginfo rpm we need the
> installer support which will install this while installing the OS.

Its a good summary of the discussion/issues.

4) Even if sysadmin/service people wants to install bunch of packages
that are *not* part of the default install - they may need to jump
through hoops (manager approvals, special permissions etc..)

IMHO - Enterprise customers can live with the additional space
requirements, if we can provide out-of-box experience. I am sure
my default RH install has 50% more than what I need for regular
use. Yes. There will be always people complaining about how bloated
are the distro images - well, we do it for a reason (most of the
times :)

Bottomline is, can we use systemtap as its intended to use without
these extra packages/info ? If not, we need to take a hard look
at it. But if its serving 90% of its intended use - may be we
are okay.

To be honest, I don't use/test default systemtap support which
comes out by the distro releases -- just because, i have to find
out where all these bits and pieces are. Instead, I build my own
kernels, get latest CVS snapshots of systemtap to make it work. 
I have this luxury since I use it for my development :)

Thanks,
Badari