Re: [PATCH][RFC] gdb support in GRUB build system

[Colin D Bennett <colin@gibibit.com>]

On Thu, 07 Aug 2008 09:37:22 +0200
Felix Zielcke <fzielcke@z-51.de> wrote:

> Am Dienstag, den 05.08.2008, 23:54 +0200 schrieb Robert Millan:
> > On Tue, Aug 05, 2008 at 01:50:21PM -0700, Colin D Bennett wrote:
> > > In that case, should --enable-debug be the default, or
> > > --disable-debug?
> > 
> > I'd prefer to disable debug as default.  What do others think?
> > 
> Have it disabled by default.
> I don't think it's useful to have them for everyone i.e. the average
> user.

I agree that having debug info for the installed GRUB is not helpful,
especially for the general end-user.  So files installed by the GRUB
install process certainly don't need debugging symbols.

My concern was only to generate the required symbol information at
build time, not to install it for a real GRUB install, or to package
these files for distribution in .rpm, .deb, etc.

I don't really care if it's the default or not since I can simply
choose my configure options as necessary for the task at hand.  If I
have a debugging situation, then I can rebuild with debug info, since
I'd have to re-start the GRUB/QEMU session anyway to begin debugging.
(And I don't use the ridiculously slow QEMU for most stuff anyway.)

> Having debug symbols in the userland tools could be maybe a bit useful
> for example in the case of the grub-probe segfault I experienced on my
> mdraid experiments.

True, in that case it makes sense to include debug info (if a
distro's other packages include it), since a core dump could be used to
debug, or if core dumps aren't enabled, then you could simply re-run it
with 'gdb grub-probe' to try to recreate the problem.  This doesn't
require the whole QEMU virtual machine situation that debugging the
GRUB boot loader itself requires.

Regards,
Colin