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

[Peter Kjellstrom]

On Monday 06 April 2009, Florian La Roche wrote:
> 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.

Of course this can be fixed manually like this. My post was intended to start 
a discussion on a global (official) "fix".

My suggestion would be a disabled-by-default "debuginfo" in the 
CentOS-Base.repo file or like c5-testing in a different file.

> > * 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.

I think I've heard that it has to do with moving the built packages around so 
that they can be signed. Either way it would be nice to have it fixed.

> > 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.

Maybe it could be resolved like DVD images? That is, a subset of mirrors opt 
in to carry debuginfo. I don't think there'd be any problems finding enough 
mirrors (the traffic is much less that the normal mirror traffic).

/Peter
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