You might remember that in my last post about the Ubuntu debuginfod service I talked about wanting to extend it and make it index and serve source code from packages. I’m excited to announce that this is now a reality since the Ubuntu Lunar (23.04) release.

The feature should work for a lot of packages from the archive, but not all of them. Keep reading to better understand why.

The problem

While debugging a package in Ubuntu, one of the first steps you need to take is to install its source code. There are some problems with this:

These past couple of months I have been working to bring debuginfod to Ubuntu. I thought it would be a good idea to make this post and explain a little bit about what the service is and how I’m planning to deploy it.

A quick recap: what’s debuginfod?

Here’s a good summary of what debuginfod is:

debuginfod is a new-ish project whose purpose is to serve
ELF/DWARF/source-code information over HTTP.  It is developed under the
elfutils umbrella.  You can find more information about it here:

  https://sourceware.org/elfutils/Debuginfod.html

In a nutshell, by using a debuginfod service you will not need to
install debuginfo (a.k.a. dbgsym) files anymore; the symbols will be
served to GDB (or any other debuginfo consumer that supports debuginfod)
over the network.  Ultimately, this makes the debugging experience much
smoother (I myself never remember the full URL of our debuginfo
repository when I need it).

If you follow the Debian project, you might know that I run their debuginfod service. In fact, the excerpt above was taken from the announcement I made last year, letting the Debian community know that the service was available.

Hi there. Long time no write!

This last Tuesday, February 23, 2021, I made an announcement at debian-devel-announce about a new service that I configured for Debian: a debuginfod server.

This post serves two purposed: pay the promise I made to Jonathan Carter that I would write a blog post about the service, and go into a bit more detail about it.

What’s debuginfod?

From the announcement above:

debuginfod is a new-ish project whose purpose is to serve
ELF/DWARF/source-code information over HTTP.  It is developed under the
elfutils umbrella.  You can find more information about it here:

  https://sourceware.org/elfutils/Debuginfod.html

In a nutshell, by using a debuginfod service you will not need to
install debuginfo (a.k.a. dbgsym) files anymore; the symbols will be
served to GDB (or any other debuginfo consumer that supports debuginfod)
over the network.  Ultimately, this makes the debugging experience much
smoother (I myself never remember the full URL of our debuginfo
repository when I need it).

Perhaps not everybody knows this, but until last year I was a Debugger Engineer (a.k.a. GDB hacker) at Red Hat. I was not involved with the creation of debuginfod directly, but I witnessed discussions about “having way to serve debug symbols over the internet” multiple times during my tenure at the company. So this is not a new idea, and it’s not even the first implementation, but it’s the first time that some engineers actually got their hands dirty enough to have something concrete in hands.