When debuging any crash gdb throws an exception stating that there is no module named backtrace. Ignoring the error message and running bt results in an infinite loop. [Thread debugging using libthread_db enabled] Using host libthread_db library "/lib/libthread_db.so.1". Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/share/gdb/auto-load/usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0.3200.3-gdb.py", line 9, in <module> from gobject import register File "/usr/share/glib-2.0/gdb/gobject.py", line 3, in <module> import gdb.backtrace ImportError: No module named backtrace [New Thread 0x7fffe59e3700 (LWP 15897)]
This isn't a gdb bug per se. Fedora gdb ships with some extra python modules that aren't upstreamed yet. The libgobject python code there is trying to use these modules. But, if you built the standard gdb, you don't have these. The libgobject code could be more adaptive here. Eventually the features appearing in those Fedora modules will make it to the FSF gdb (we're working on it now),but in a different form.
it's still a bug because it writes error messages, which are apparently not relevant. for a user who doesn't know these inner workings it looks like the program is broken.
If it is a bug, it is in the python code distributed with glib. There isn't much that gdb can do about it. We can't disable the error messages because then we get complaints that gdb swallows error messages from python scripts.
In case anyone ends up here: the bug report for glib is at https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=623552