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The biggest issue with debugging on Linux is still the awful state of debug symbols. Linux famously lacks the equivalent of Microsoft’s symbol server and that c

The biggest issue with debugging on Linux is still the awful state of debug symbols. Linux famously lacks the equivalent of Microsoft’s symbol server and that changes almost everything to the worse.

glandium 6y ago
That's not true anymore, but it's not widespread yet. https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2019/10/14/introducing-debuginfod-the-elfutils-debuginfo-server/ https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2019/10/14/introducing-de...
db48x 6y ago
Agreed. Fedora/Centos/RHEL have debug packages though, so the symbols are available for most software that you've got on your machine. GDB prints out a message reminding you to install them, but doesn't actually do it for you. We also have PolicyKit, so in principle GDB could just ask for those packages to be installed. We should close the gap, and while we're at it we should make PolicyKit not ask for the root password when installing debug packages. Then it could be a seamless process, at least for software installed from the official packages.
forrestthewoods 6y ago
Symbol server is critical. I wish the whole debugging environment was even simpler though. Binaries. Debug Symbols. Source Code. I wish those three things could be trivially merged and split. For internal builds I want to deploy a single binary that contains symbols and source code. This way issues can be trivially debugged by anyone on any machine. For public builds I wish to split out symbols and source which can be hosted on a symbol server.