Sunday 26 June 2016
Dear Ubuntu, Please Fix Your Debuginfo Packaging
Fedora has a delightfully simple approach to supplying debuginfo for its packages: you run sudo dnf debuginfo-install <original-package-name> and everything you need to debug that code is installed (including sources). It also installs debuginfo for dependent packages.
Ubuntu does not. With Ubuntu, you first have to figure out the name of the debuginfo package to install. This is not easy. Once you've figured that out. you install the package and find that it's mostly useless because it doesn't contain sources. So you try to install sources using sudo apt source ..., but that fails because "You must put some 'source' URIs in your sources.list". Then you look at /etc/apt/sources.list and discover that all the necessary deb-src URLs are there, but commented out by default. (Why? Because otherwise it would make things too easy?) Then you uncomment those URLs and try again, but get the same error. Then you wail and gnash your teeth a bit and figure out you need to run sudo apt-get update before retrying. Finally you've got the source package installed, then you run rr replay (or gdb if you must) and discover that it's not finding those sources. Then, unless you're more stubborn than I am (or just have more time to burn), you give up in despair.
Seriously Ubuntu (or Debian), just copy Red Hat here. Please.
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