Adventures with strace (somewhat off topic)

[Michael Abbott]

This is somewhat off topic, but crosstool-NG does include strace in its 
build, so I thought I'd raise this here first.

I've been experimenting with strace on arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi with 
mixed results.  There are three extant versions with rather differing 
behaviour:

4.5.16: This is the version built by crosstool-ng (together with nine 
patches).  This works well enough, except that it doesn't recognise a 
number of ARM system calls, in particular socket calls aren't properly 
traced.

4.5.17: I tried this about a week ago.  Compilation failed at first, but I 
found this patch: http://marc.info/?l=strace&m=120126455227098&w=2 .  The 
patch doesn't apply cleanly, but it seems good enough, and the result 
looks quite satisfactory so far.

4.5.18: Just checked the strace sourceforge site, and this is the only 
version visible for download (hmm).  Unfortunately this fails to compile, 
hitting a #error (line 435 of linux/arm/syscallent.h).  This is a *very* 
recent release, 29th August!


The reason I bring this up here (rather than on the strace list) is that, 
looking at the strace sourceforge web site, I'm hugely troubled by the 
state of this project:

1. The mailing list (http://marc.info/?l=strace) is spammed to death, and 
so there's no point in trying to subscribe or write to it.

2. Two releases in a row are completely broken (compilation fails) for 
ARM.

3. There is no bug tracking mechanism in place.

4. Only the most recent (and definitely broken) release is visible on the 
download page, and the download site used by crosstool-ng 
	http://mesh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/strace/
is poorly responsive, generates garbage and shows no listing of available 
releases.


Is this an orphaned project?  Does anybody here know anything about the 
state of this really rather valuable tool?

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