Hi,

I'm the maintainer of debuginfod.debian.net (currently offline due to a
hardware issue :-/).  The service provides only debuginfo for now, but I
would like to start indexing the source code of each package as well.

I know that Fedora has the "debugsource" RPM package which makes things
easier, but after talking to some Debian/Ubuntu Developers they were
(understandably) not happy with the idea of implementing a similar
solution for deb packages.

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?  I'm not
entirely familiar with how debuginfod does things behind the scenes, but
initially I thought something along the following lines:

1) Obtain the .dsc file which corresponds to the -dbgsym package being
   analysed;

2) Use dget(1) to obtain its corresponding source + patches, then index
   everything.

3) Compress the source tree and store it somewhere, associating the
   compressed file with the build-id(s) of the -dbgsym file.  (Is this
   really necessary?  Not sure.)

4) When a build-id request comes in, we serve the debuginfo from the
   -dbgsym file and decompress the source tarball corresponding to it,
   serving whatever files are needed.  I'd assume that this is similar
   to what debuginfod already does for Fedora's -debugsource packages.

This is a "back-of-the-napkin" thought about how to adjust debuginfod
for Debian/Ubuntu, but of course I'd like to hear your opinion as well.

Thanks,

-- 
Sergio
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