Re: debuginfod & Debian source packages

[Sergio Durigan Junior <sergiodj@sergiodj.net>]

On Thursday, June 02 2022, Frank Ch. Eigler wrote:

> Hi -

Hi Frank,

>> 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.)

I have to backport the new version to Debian bullseye, but yeah, this is
on my TODO list.

>> [...]
>> 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.

Sure, I believe an external script/program could do things behind the
scenes without problem.

> 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.

OK, this was going to be my next question.  Out of curiosity, how would
debuginfod invoke this external program?

Thanks,

-- 
Sergio
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