On 30/05/12 14:14, Russell Coker wrote:
On Wed, 30 May 2012, James Harper<james.harper@bendigoit.com.au> wrote:
If done properly, the dbg builds would have various compiler optimisations turned off too. Under Windows, a debug ('checked') build includes all the ASSERTS and DebugPrint messages too which are stripped out in the 'free' build.
Yes compiler optimisation often makes debugging difficult. Compilers are free to optimise out arithmetic and logical steps.
But even knowing approximately which line of the function had the error can really help.
Only if you're a developer for that distribution.
Everyone else will either be: An end-user - in which case they'll hit "restart" and continue, and possibly complain a bit in a forum somewhere.
An upstream developer - in which case they'll already be compiling it from source and have debug symbols if desired.
(here I go again about MS) When an app crashes under Windows a minidump is collected and the user is given the option to send the dump info to Microsoft for collection and analysis (despite popular belief, this analysis does actually happen!). Such a thing would be really cool under Linux as it would allow the aggregation of a huge amount of information and allow the developers to spot the bugs that most require attention, eg "hmmm... 1000 reports in the last 24 hours of a crash at line 42... that's probably worth looking at!". Like Windows, it would also allow a response to be returned when the crash is submitted like "This bug is resolved in the latest version. Please upgrade.". You still don't need the symbols on your PC though. James