[gs-devel] Re: Crash reporting links xefitra

[Igor V. Melichev]

I think there are 2 main problems here :

1. C stack content is compiler specific.
2. Line numbers and function names are not included
in release build binaries.

Well, the 2 may be overcame with
storing a xref in the linker step, and a post-mortal
dump analysis.

Also I think we don't need it for gcc because it
does this job perfectly.

Attaching a 3d party experience would be useful.

Igor.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ralph Giles" <ralph.giles at artifex.com>
To: <gs-devel at ghostscript.com>
Cc: <tech at artifex.com>
Sent: Monday, August 27, 2007 11:50 PM
Subject: Crash reporting links


> At the staff meeting last week, we briefly discussed crash report 
> generation. The basic idea was to print a C stack trace on crash
> to make it easier to fill out meaningful bug reports and save us
> an analysis step.
> 
> I looked at how the GNOME project's bug-buddy works. Basically, a
> signal handler in one of the platform libraries runs gdb on the
> application to generate a backtrace.
> 
> Because signal handling is platform specific, I think the way to 
> implement this is just to hook in some code from the respective 
> gp_init() calls, rather than try to write a gp_print_backtrace().
> 
> Another interesting projet is google breakpad, which attempts to
> do stack trace generation on Windows, MacOS and linux without
> recourse to a coincidentally-installed debugger.
> 
>  http://code.google.com/p/google-breakpad/
> 
> FWIW,
> -r