Re: debuginfod & Debian source packages

["Frank Ch. Eigler" <fche@redhat.com>]

Hi -

> I'm the maintainer of debuginfod.debian.net (currently offline due to a
> hardware issue :-/).

O no.  (And also, please consider upgrading your elfutils version, as
later ones have less pessimal behavior with long grooming ops.)

> The service provides only debuginfo for now, but I
> would like to start indexing the source code of each package as well.

Neat!

> [...]
> I'm now thinking about an alternative solution to this problem.  Debian
> source packages already contain everything needed to be indexed and
> served to debuginfo consumers; it has the full source code + all the
> downstream patches.  It's represented by a .dsc file that can be fed to
> dget(1) which will download the source tarball and apply all the patches
> automatically.
> 
> Do you think we can teach debuginfod to consume these files and do the
> right thing when indexing the source code of each package? [...]

Interesting idea, but I'd throw it back at you thusly: does debuginfod
need to this itself on the fly?  Other than perhaps a time/storage
tradeoff, is there some reason an auxiliary program couldn't do this
in the background?  Take designated .dsc's, download, apply patches,
and assemble the patched sources into, well, any old random tarball
format?  If someone(tm) were to write such a script, we could ship it
alongside debuginfod if desired.

As long as the archive file name was a close match to the binary deb
file names, and as long as the constituent files were named with the
same paths as mentioned in the binary dwarf, debuginfod would gladly
take the result and serve from it.


- FChE