[CentOS-devel] why provide debuginfo (was: debuginfo packages on the mirrors)

[Peter Kjellstrom]

On Saturday 04 April 2009, Karanbir Singh wrote:
> On 04/03/2009 05:18 PM, Pär Andersson wrote:
> > However I think having debuginfo packages for the kernel in the main
> > repository would really be a good thing as tools like oprofile and
> > systemtap (both in base) need kernel-debuginfo to be usable.
>
> btw, does the kernel-debug not give you already everything that is
> needed for systemtap/oprofile ? thats already there in the main distro
> tree.

kernel-debug is not at all what I typically want when I go looking for 
kernel-debuginfo. What I want is to run tools (like oprofile and systemtap) 
on that (running) system right there and then. Ideally that should go 
something like this:

1) uuh, I need to run this .stp-script
2) stap xxx.stp

But since the kernel-debuginfo, kernel-devel may typically be missing for the 
running kernel the following step would have to be done between 1 and 2:

1.5) yum install kernel-debuginfo kernel-devel

But since we today lack a yumified way of doing this the step above typically 
turns into:

* look for a mirror that has debuginfo (sometimes it stops here with debuginfo 
for the kernel missing)
* download manually
* install manually (including ignoring the fact that debuginfo packages are 
unsigned...)

So I guess the good news is that here we have a part of CentOS with great 
potential for improvements :-)

/Peter
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