Build IDs for finding packages

[Bruce Dawson <bruced at valvesoftware dot com>]

I'm working on Steam and on Valve's games for Linux and I've been spending quite a bit of time finding symbol files for libc6 and libstdc++ on various versions and distributions of Linux. It seems like this is the problem that Build IDs were meant to solve but I have yet to find a broad database that maps Build IDs to either a symbol file or a package file. The problem is particularly tricky when getting breakpad<http://code.google.com/p/google-breakpad/> crash reports back from other distributions.

I've started creating my own mapping by crawling the Ubuntu repositories, downloading each package, extracting the contents, and creating a .build-id directory containing package URLs. However it seems like this would be much more easily done by individual distributions.

Do Fedora or any other Linux distributions already have such a database accessible? Given the URL of a .deb or .rpm file I can easily extract the contents - I'd just like a more reliable way to find the package from the Build ID.

I'm not concerned about finding a single database that covers all distributions - I'm quite happy to download or scan a database for each major distribution. This could either be a .tar file of mappings, or a web page with Build ID links to package URLs.

Any thoughts on this topic?

I've started blogging about the process of finding Linux symbols (http://randomascii.wordpress.com/category/linux/) and I'd love to able to recommend a Build ID based method that would work simply and more reliably.

Thanks for any help or comments.

I’m working on Steam and on Valve’s games for Linux and I’ve been spending quite a bit of time finding symbol files for libc6 and libstdc++ on various versions and distributions of Linux. It seems like this is the problem that Build IDs were meant to solve but I have yet to find a broad database that maps Build IDs to either a symbol file or a package file. The problem is particularly tricky when getting breakpad crash reports back from other distributions.

 

I’ve started creating my own mapping by crawling the Ubuntu repositories, downloading each package, extracting the contents, and creating a .build-id directory containing package URLs. However it seems like this would be much more easily done by individual distributions.

 

Do Fedora or any other Linux distributions already have such a database accessible? Given the URL of a .deb or .rpm file I can easily extract the contents – I’d just like a more reliable way to find the package from the Build ID.

 

I’m not concerned about finding a single database that covers all distributions – I’m quite happy to download or scan a database for each major distribution. This could either be a .tar file of mappings, or a web page with Build ID links to package URLs.

 

Any thoughts on this topic?

 

I’ve started blogging about the process of finding Linux symbols (http://randomascii.wordpress.com/category/linux/) and I’d love to able to recommend a Build ID based method that would work simply and more reliably.

 

Thanks for any help or comments.