4 ms·

The blog post could be titled "Why the Linux distribution model is totally broken for end user software". As a linux user I appreciate the work, but it's tough

• ohthehugemanate 5y ago
  Really? Because I just think about how impossible this would be on Windows, where shared or external libs are inscrutable, as are OS build chains, version differences, etc etc.
  • gsvelto 5y ago
    We do gather symbol information on Windows too, but it's a lot less detailed than what we get from Linux. It also requires jumping through a lot of hoops. For example we get minimal information from Windows graphics drivers and we have to semi-manually scrape them ourselves.
  • kevingadd 5y ago
    To get symbols for basically any MS library I just add the official MS symbol server to my symbol search list. Chrome has one too, there's no real reason other vendors couldn't do it. You can also just ship a .pdb file next to your binaries, and I think the only good reasons for not doing that are keeping download sizes small (use a symbol server...) or paranoid secrecy. For example, NVIDIA's windows drivers are like 600mb at this point yet they don't even include function name symbols. It's inexcusable.
  • phendrenad2 5y ago
    Has Windows ever broken Firefox? Do you think it's more or less likely to happen in Windows (or Mac) or Linux?