Wireshark · Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Wireshark Installer on mac grew in size

[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Jun 25, 2018, at 8:03 PM, Graham Bloice <graham.bloice@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Windows there are 2 approaches used:
> 	• Install the PDB files alongside the application, this allows WER to annotate the dump logs produced with symbols.
> 	• Set up a public symbol server, add the symbols to that and then anyone can set their Windows debugger to pull the appropriate symbols from the symbol server. The correct symbols are automagically retrieved.

The same is true on macOS; we're currently using the first approach, but I guess people aren't happy about the space taken up and/or the download time required for the macOS equivalent of PDB files, namely dSYM files (well, directories containing files, but I digress).

How big would the PDB files be?  If they're in the realm of 400-500 MB, the same complaints would presumably be made if we installed them automatically as part of the Wireshark installation process.

And "download them afterwards" or "install them optionally" is inferior to "have a symbol server", as "download them afterwards" or "install them optionally" doesn't help if the problem can't be reproduced after the symbols are downloaded or installed as part of a re-installation.

In addition, have a *symbolication* server means that people *not* running the OS on which the crash occurred can still get the crash symbolicated.

(Now, if we can somehow arrange to have the major Linux distributions somehow have a way to get symbolicated stack traces, that'd mean the majority of crashes will have nice symbolicated crash dumps or would have a way to get a nice symbolicated crash dump.)