Re: Inquiry about Development Features and Integration of Source Code Version Control Systems

[Matt Schulte <schultetwin1@gmail.com>]

Hi Tobias,

I wanted to provide an alternative solution that may work for you
(with or without support from debuginfod).

Support for reading source code directly from a code hosting service
(such as GitHub) has been supported for years by Microsoft via
SourceLink[1]. In 2018, a proposal[2] was submitted to the DWARF
standard to include sourcelink information in the DWARF format. In
2022, a modification to the proposal[2] was accepted and is in the
current working draft for DWARF6[3]. The proposal is to place the
source URL for any file with an available URL in the DWARF
information.

There is still a lot of work to do. The DWARF6 specification needs to
be published, compilers (or external tools) need to support adding the
URLs into the DWARF info, and debuggers need to support downloading
the source files. But it could provide a path for you (or debuginfod)
to support reading directly from the upstream source repository.

> Can you explain under what situations you think this would be helpful?

I can only think about situations that involve closed source software.
In my experience, companies shipping closed source software have
restrictions about where source code can be placed.

-Matt
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/reference/sourcelink?view=msvc-170
[2]: https://dwarfstd.org/issues/181223.1.html
[3]: https://snapshots.sourceware.org/dwarfstd/dwarf-spec/latest/dwarf6-20240227-2154.pdf