abrt and pk-debuginfo-install

Recently I’ve been looking at the abrt project. It’s looking pretty good so far, with one notable exception: Currently they install the debugging packages using the Fedora script debuginfo-install, and scrape the standard out for errors, and inject to standard in an unconditional ‘Y’ to anything that looks like a question. The script is also used by gdb to ask the user to install certain debuginfo packages. It’s not great form to ask the user to run a random command, when the program is more than capable.

Program received signal SIGINT, Interrupt.
0x00a63422 in __kernel_vsyscall ()
Missing separate debuginfos, use: debuginfo-install DeviceKit-003-1.i586 DeviceKit-power-009-0.74.20090628git.fc11.i586 GConf2-2.26.2-1.fc11.i586

Now, some explaining. Fedora stores debuginfo packages in separate debuginfo repositories. This means the install-debuginfo script has to enable sources, get the deps of the packages to install, and install as many of the debuginfo packages as it can find, and then disable the sources it enabled. This is all horribly Fedora specific, and of course has to be done as root.

[hughsie@hughsie-laptop src]$ debuginfo-install DeviceKit-003-1.i586 DeviceKit-power-009-0.74.20090628git.fc11.i586 GConf2-2.26.2-1.fc11.i586
You must be root to run this command.

For a cool trick, I’ve make a PackageKit version of this script, called pk-install-debuginfo. It does exactly the same thing as the Fedora debuginfo-install script, but runs as the user and uses all the PK methods underneath the hood. So in theory pk-install-debuginfo would run on Kubuntu or on Foresight (or the others too) with a little tweaking.

[hughsie@hughsie-laptop ~]$ pk-debuginfo-install DeviceKit-003-1.i586
1. Getting sources list...OK. Found 10 enabled and 29 disabled sources.
2. Finding debugging sources...OK. Found 4 disabled debuginfo repos.
3. Enabling debugging sources...OK. Enabled 4 debugging sources.
4. Finding debugging packages...OK. Found 1 packages:
5. Finding packages that depend on these packages...OK. No extra packages required.
Found 1 packages to install:
1    DeviceKit-debuginfo-003-1(i586)    fedora-debuginfo
6. Installing packages...OK.
7. Disabling sources previously enabled...OK. Disabled 4 debugging sources.

Except it won’t, as other distros do things differently. I’m guessing some store the debuginfo files in the main repositories (and hence no sources need to be enabled), and some others call the files -dbg rather than -debuginfo. So now I need your help. If your distro does things differently from the Fedora way, please tell me how, and I’ll add support for it in pk-install-debuginfo.

Of course, if the sources are signed and no repos need to be enabled, then things just install without authentication. This is how it’s supposed to work. I’ve also added a man page and I’ll be adding a config file for pk-install-debuginfo soon.

Of course, if you don’t like the idea, just pass –disable-debuginfo-install to the configure script when compiling PackageKit. Comments welcome.