RE: Build IDs for finding packages

[Bruce Dawson <bruced at valvesoftware dot com>]

Thanks for the information on different ways of finding symbols through build IDs. I put a post on my blog on Wednesday covering what I learned, and demonstrating an alternate technique that I created for Ubuntu.

http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/02/20/symbols-on-linux-part-three-linux-versus-windows/

-----Original Message-----
From: Josh Stone [mailto:jistone@redhat.com] 
Sent: Monday, January 28, 2013 10:48 AM
To: Bruce Dawson
Cc: 'Mark Wielaard'; kushal@fedoraproject.org; 'elfutils-devel@lists.fedorahosted.org'
Subject: Re: Build IDs for finding packages

On 01/28/2013 09:11 AM, Bruce Dawson wrote:
> I'm confused as to how the first install method below (the yum based
> one) is supposed to work. Is the translation from the .build-id path 
> to a package name supposed to happen on my machine or on the 
> repository?

The translation happens through the yum repo's filelists, which is an extra set of metadata that gets fetched when you request any path-based operation.  Thus it's unrelated to what you have installed.

> My Fedora machine doesn't have a /usr/lib/debug/.build-id directory 
> yet (I haven't installed any debug packages on it) and when I tried 
> the syntax below for libc-2.16.so's build ID it said no package 
> available.

As Mark mentioned, it will only work for the packages actually in the repos, and Fedora only keeps the most current update in the repos, not anything formerly released.  He only included fedora-debuginfo, which has the packages of the original release, but you probably should use --enablerepo=updates-debuginfo too.