Draft of branch maintainence and release plans....

[David Lee]

On Mon, 8 Jul 2002, Green, Paul wrote:

> I would be willing to work (off-list) with a small number of OS experts to
> agree on an API for producing a back-trace of the stack.  I know how we do
> this for VOS, I know some of the issues involved, and I believe that such an
> API definition should be independent of Samba.  The challenge is to produce
> an OS-independent API that is flexible enough to accommodate the rather wide
> variety of operating systems, while hiding the guts of the mechanism from
> the callers. (The code to actually traverse the stack and produce output
> that can be interpreted by mortals or even by code is almost certainly going
> to be OS-specific, but I think we can probably produce an API that we can
> all then implement).  If anyone else considers themselves qualified &
> interested, please contact me off-list.

Thanks for the note.  (I'm keeping the reply on-list for the present, as
it discusses a fundamental general principle, rather than detail.)

What you propose sounds interesting, but very ambitious!

When we originally discussed this back in April, we were proposing a much
simpler model that used existing tools.

In essence, the "./configure"  script would look for a debugging program
from a known list ("gdb" etc.).  Associated with each such program would
be a list of its sub-commands that would extract the relevant information,
such as a backtrace.  That information would then be used to build the
default "panic action" for this particular installation.

Remember, that the sole purpose of this is simply to set a decent default
behaviour for the vast number of Samba admins (such as me!) who don't
dabble any more deeply than is necessary.  If a particular sys.admin. at a
particular site wishes to do more, they can still set their own "panic
action".

So I understood it, one of the key aims was to use as simple as possible a
method to get a default behaviour that would extract something useful.  It
wasn't (originally, at least) intended to be any more complicated than
that. 

The key message from Andrew Bartlett is in the samba-technical archives: 
   http://lists.samba.org/pipermail/samba-technical/2002-April/035873.html


I'm quite happy to help on some example Sun/Solaris detail in such a
structure.  We have various Solaris versions, Sun's C compiler; Sun's
debugging tools (and also gcc/gdb).  The ONLY major thing (apart from the
ubiquitous time constraints!) that stops me proceeding is the possible
issue with file descriptors onto the log file, mentioned in that archived
message.  If someone else can look after that aspect then I'll try to help
on some example (Sun-related) detail. 

Hope that helps.


-- 

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