Fedora 35 Looking To Make Use Of Debuginfod By Default

Red Hat engineers spearheaded the work on Debuginfod for being able to fetch debuginfo/sources from centralized servers for a project to cut-down on manually having to install the relevant debug packages manually on a system as well as that occupying extra disk space and just being a hassle. The Fedora project is now getting their Debuginfod server off the ground and for Fedora Linux 35 are planning to make use of it by default.

Debuginfod was plumbed last year into GNU Binutils and has seen support by the likes of the GNU debugger and other toolchain components. Debuginfod is quite nice for the reasons mentioned around transparently getting necessary debugging data and source code on-demand rather than dealing with the mess of debug packages.

Some Linux distributions like Debian have already launched their own debuginfod servers while Fedora has been getting their infrastructure off the ground. For Fedora 35 this autumn they are looking to have their distribution ready to use this support by default.

A change proposal was filed yesterday for using Debuginfod by default in this H2'2021 Linux distribution update.

Those that missed the past articles on Debuginfod can learn more about the initiative at Sourceware.org.