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

[Florian La Roche]

Hello Peter,

On Mon, Apr 06, 2009 at 11:04:13AM +0200, Peter Kjellstrom wrote:
> 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)

I just add http://debuginfo.centos.org/$releasever/$basearch/ as a new repo into
all CentOS installs. Disabled by default, but prepared to download rpms from if
I need to.

> * download manually
> * install manually (including ignoring the fact that debuginfo packages are 
> unsigned...)

Hope this can be changed, but no idea where in the process this needs to be.

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

I think it is very good to keep the debuginfo separate from the rest of the
mirror system to not overload mirrors. Question will be on how that scales
with more and more people accessing debuginfo.centos.org.

regards,

Florian La Roche