Introducing automatic crash reporting in Edgy

[John Richard Moser]

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Jerry Haltom wrote:
> I am curious, with regard to these debug symbols, if it would be
> possible to remove their need.
> 
> bug-buddy and related crash reporting applications could be made to
> submit a core file. This core file, when combined with the -dbg package
> *by a developer* would result in the proper stack track. Seeing as all

No good.  I fortunately don't have to argue against randomly submitting
core files because it's infeasible and pitti is smarter than that.  The
simple fact is that decrypted PGP private keys and passwords are
sometimes in the program's address space; it is simply unacceptable for
us to do a little hand-waving and say "you can trust us with your
ultra-secret data, honestly."

It is possible to use debugging information about the binaries involved
to rebuild the environment they were in and get a backtrace later.  I
came up with a relocation process that lets you translate the addresses
collected to a new instance of the same program; basic idea is simple,
you know the address each library is loaded at, subtract that from each
address that fell inside that library at crash time and add it to the
address the library is loaded at at debug time.  This will let us
collect symbols later regardless of address space randomization.

Using tricks like this with full debugging symbols, it should be
somewhat trivial to load up gdb and ask it for symbol names at various
addresses.  You'll probably want to sort out stack frames on stack dumps
taken at crash time though, that'll be much easier than trying to sort
it out later; although we *shouldn't* be sending those stack dumps in by
default.

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