building Release symbols for Win32

[Allan Edwards <ak...@us.ibm.com>]

Unless someone knows a trick that I'm not aware of
debugging Win32 crash dumps (DrWatson .dmp files) can
be a real pain unless you have symbols because
Frame Pointer Omission records make it hard to
construct the call stack from a dump. Having symbols
that match the binary build handy when you examine
the dump avoids this problem.

Does anyone have a reason we shouldn't build .pdb
files for Release builds (we already do it for Debug
builds). This only increases the size of the DLL by
a few bytes and has negligible impact on performance.

The plan would be to update the Release build for
every .dsp in Apache.dsw:

- in compiler settings generate "Program Database" Debug
Info (/Zi)

- in the Linker Debug settings generate "Microsoft Format"
debug Info (/debug)

The other thing we would need to do would be to save
away the .pdb files when the binary install package is
built (I don't think we'd want to package them in the
install image since the files are quite large).

Allan Edwards

RE: building Release symbols for Win32

[Bill Stoddard <bi...@wstoddard.com>]

> 
> Unless someone knows a trick that I'm not aware of
> debugging Win32 crash dumps (DrWatson .dmp files) can
> be a real pain unless you have symbols because
> Frame Pointer Omission records make it hard to
> construct the call stack from a dump. Having symbols
> that match the binary build handy when you examine
> the dump avoids this problem.
> 
> Does anyone have a reason we shouldn't build .pdb
> files for Release builds (we already do it for Debug
> builds). This only increases the size of the DLL by
> a few bytes and has negligible impact on performance.
> 
> The plan would be to update the Release build for
> every .dsp in Apache.dsw:
> 
> - in compiler settings generate "Program Database" Debug
> Info (/Zi)
> 
> - in the Linker Debug settings generate "Microsoft Format"
> debug Info (/debug)
> 
> The other thing we would need to do would be to save
> away the .pdb files when the binary install package is
> built (I don't think we'd want to package them in the
> install image since the files are quite large).
> 
> Allan Edwards
>

Sounds like a really good idea to me.

Bill 

RE: building Release symbols for Win32

[Bill Stoddard <bi...@wstoddard.com>]

> 
> Unless someone knows a trick that I'm not aware of
> debugging Win32 crash dumps (DrWatson .dmp files) can
> be a real pain unless you have symbols because
> Frame Pointer Omission records make it hard to
> construct the call stack from a dump. Having symbols
> that match the binary build handy when you examine
> the dump avoids this problem.
> 
> Does anyone have a reason we shouldn't build .pdb
> files for Release builds (we already do it for Debug
> builds). This only increases the size of the DLL by
> a few bytes and has negligible impact on performance.
> 
> The plan would be to update the Release build for
> every .dsp in Apache.dsw:
> 
> - in compiler settings generate "Program Database" Debug
> Info (/Zi)
> 
> - in the Linker Debug settings generate "Microsoft Format"
> debug Info (/debug)
> 
> The other thing we would need to do would be to save
> away the .pdb files when the binary install package is
> built (I don't think we'd want to package them in the
> install image since the files are quite large).
> 
> Allan Edwards
>

Sounds like a really good idea to me.

Bill