Re: Optionally using a better backtrace library?

Hi,

On 2023-07-03 11:58:25 +0200, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> On 2023-Jul-02, Andres Freund wrote:
> > I like that we now have a builtin backtrace ability. Unfortunately I think the
> > backtraces are often not very useful, because only externally visible
> > functions are symbolized.
>
> Agreed, these backtraces are pretty close to useless. Not completely,
> but I haven't found a practical way to use them for actual debugging
> of production problems.

Yea. And I've grown pretty tired asking people to break out gdb in production
scenarios :/

> > Nice things about libbacktrace are that the generation of stack traces is
> > documented to be async signal safe on most platforms (with a #define to figure
> > that out, and a more minimal safe version always available) and that it
> > supports a wide range of platforms:
>
> Sadly, it looks like the library is seldom distributed.

It's often distributed as part of gcc.

> For example, Debian seems to only have a package called android-libbacktrace
> which I imagine is not what we want.

Indeed not.

> On my system I see a static library only -- is that enough? That file is
> part of package libgcc-10-dev, which tells me that we can't depend on that
> for packaging purposes.

We should be able to depend on that gcc-NN depends on libgcc-NN-dev, it
contains all the compiler version specific stuff. It's where the intrinsics
headers, C runtime initialization, sanitizer libraries all live. clang will
typically also depend on libgcc-NN-dev on unixoid systems.

And since it's statically linked (and needs to be apparently), you don't need
libgcc-NN-dev installed at runtime.

> I think it's pretty much the same in the RPM side of the world.

I don't know much about that side of the world...

Greetings,

Andres Freund