[arch-dev-public] Debug packages for Arch Linux

[Jelle van der Waa]

Hey all,

On 30/01/2022 12:08, Morten Linderud via arch-dev-public wrote:
> I'm very happy to announce that debug packages in Arch Linux has been deployed :)
> 
> This work began after FOSDEM 2020 and was announced in November 2020. However
> because of time constraints it took quite a while before we managed to deploy
> it.
> 
> Currently we have a debuginfod service which is capable of delivering source
> listings and debug symbols to users with gdb, delve and other debuggers. This
> can be enabled by installing the `debuginfod` package and setting the
> environment variable `DEBUGINFOD_URLS="https://debuginfod.archlinux.org"`. The
> `debuginfod` package is also going to be providing this variable :)
> 
> The debug package repositories themself are not publicly accessible nor
> distributed to our mirrors. This is because there is a general concern around
> the repository size increase. The goal is to take a look at distributing them
> and/or making them accessible in the future.
> 
> Packages are being rebuilt for debug symbols where deemed needed by the packager
> and I suspect we should have a discussion around enabling the debug option by
> default or not. However see the section below around creating debug packages as
> there are some caveats of the current approach.
> 
> I have added some links to the work that has been done to accomplish all of this
> at the bottom of this email.

There are two questions which keep popping up around debug packages so I 
thought it would be good to answer them here.

* How do I create a debug package?

Add 'debug' to the options array in your PKGBUILD, bump pkgrel and 
rebuild. This should result into a debug package based on the 'pkgbase' 
of the package/PKGBUILD so for linux it ends up creating 
linux-debug-$pkgver-$pkgrel.tar.zst.

* How do I verify if the debug package is generated correctly?

After installing the debug package, gdb $binary should reveal:

[jelle at t14s][~]%gdb /usr/bin/cryptsetup
Reading symbols from /usr/bin/cryptsetup...
Reading symbols from /usr/lib/debug/usr/bin/cryptsetup.debug...

Apart from that the debug package should not contain any other paths 
then /usr/lib/debug and /usr/src/debug. Ideally namcap would print a 
warning when this is not the case.

Hope this helps,

Jelle van der Waa
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