Re: Release schedule

[Alexander Malmberg]

Willem Rein Oudshoorn wrote:
> Alexander Malmberg <address@hidden> writes:
> > No, but it depends on what kind of crash reporter is intended.
> 
> Well, this brings me to the following idea.
> We have code in base that gives the returns the return addresses
> of the current stack frame.

Even if it can grab the immediate return address, it's a much more
difficult problem to walk backwards and get the other return addresses
that are part of the stack trace. I'm not sure how capable this code is,
though.

> gdb and the addr2line utility can translate these addresses to
> filenames and linenumbers.

Only if the programs and libraries were compiled with debugging
information, which is not the case by default. (I've hacked my local
copy of -make to always compile with -g, but there is a significant disk
space hit associated with this.) You can still usually get the function
names, which is better than nothing.

> If we can combine these two inside base we could put
> as extra information in the exceptions the stacktrace
> with filenames and line numbers.
> 
> This will help with debugging.

Automagically invoking gdb or something to grab filenames and line
numbers would be a big help in many cases. (Not as much as a clear,
"working" description of how to reproduce a problem, though. :)

- Alexander Malmberg