GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 473559
On Solaris use "pstack" to get trace information if gdb is not available.
Last modified: 2010-08-14 02:37:02 UTC
On solaris, gdb is not always installed/available by default, however pstack is always available. This is a feature request to use pstack in these situations.
Created attachment 94922 [details] [review] Use pstack Patch to use pstack on solaris if gdb is not available.
I'd love to get more comments on this patch and approach, hence CC'ing Brian who attended the Bugsquad BoF at GUADEC and Cosimo who is becoming more and more the defacto maintainer of this unmaintained piece of software named bug-buddy... :-)
The patch itself, apart from some few coding style nitpicks, looks mostly fine to me. Some comments on the approach: - googling around I found it seems that Solaris always ships a debugger called "adb", but I don't know if the information I found is up-to-date. Maybe here someone from Sun can help us; I want to make sure that pstack is really and widely installed in Solaris. - using pstack or other debuggers if gdb isn't found can be a good idea for Linux as well, so I would remove the Solaris #ifdefs from the patch. Anyway, I'd like to test it (better if on a Solaris installation) before committing it but I don't know if I'll be able to do this in time for 2.24 as we are already late in this cycle.
Cosimo, adb is a very old debugger. mdb replaced it in Solaris 8 and you probably won't find anyone but dedicated retro hackers attempting to run a modern GNOME on anything before Solaris 10 so it would be safe to use mdb. But pstack is really the better option for this because it's a simple command line utility which gives you exactly what you want in a remote bug logging system with very little overhead. Andre, Thanks for the comment. I talked to someone on the firefox team about their system where a crash log server fills in details of clients which don't have the source packages. But it would be much easier to rely on gdb/pstack and make sure the dists have the appropriate source packages. One thing I would like to do is provide a better way of tagging OS+Dist+Release+Arch in the bugs that bug-buddy automatically logs to make it easier for the dist provider (e.g. me) to triage bugs which they can easily reproduce in their environment.
Created attachment 117778 [details] [review] Patch combining 473561 and 473559 Re-generated patch for latest bug-buddy trunk. I've also added patching of gnome-breakpad.cc taken from bug 473561, so this bug can record the complete functionality for enabling pstack usage within bug-buddy for solaris users who don't have gdb installed.
Created attachment 117780 [details] [review] re-vised patch
Matt, thanks for the updated patch. The patch looks mostly fine to me, apart from some style nitpicks. I am planning to test the patch and commit it to trunk after branching for gnome-2-24, as we're late for new features in this cycle.
Thanks Cosimo, let me know if there's anything else I can do.
In light of Oracle's decision to discontinue OpenSolaris and focus on Solaris 11, we are closing this bug as WONTFIX -- for lack of a CANTFIX resolution. If this problem is still reproducible, the reporter is advised to resolve it downstream.