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Bug 4309 - Symbols not available for prebuilt SDL binaries
Summary: Symbols not available for prebuilt SDL binaries
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: SDL
Classification: Unclassified
Component: build (show other bugs)
Version: 2.0.9
Hardware: All Windows 10
: P2 normal
Assignee: Sam Lantinga
QA Contact: Sam Lantinga
URL:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2018-10-13 04:44 UTC by Cameron Gutman
Modified: 2018-11-03 00:22 UTC (History)
0 users

See Also:

Attachments
Save PDBs in windows-buildbot-zipper.bat (1.03 KB, text/plain)
2018-10-13 04:44 UTC, Cameron Gutman 		Details
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Description Cameron Gutman 2018-10-13 04:44:35 UTC 
Created attachment 3369 [details]
Save PDBs in windows-buildbot-zipper.bat

Having PDBs (and DSYMs for Mac) are very useful for debugging crash dumps and basically essential for getting useful data out of the Windows Desktop Analytics program (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/appxpkg/windows-desktop-application-program) since you only get stacktraces in the majority of crashes (symbolicated by Microsoft using PDBs that you upload to their portal). I'd prefer not to have to build my own SDL binaries just to get symbols for debugging.

Although I'm not sure exactly how your release builds are made, I found a script that seems potentially relevant and updated it to copy PDBs into the zip along with the .dll and .lib files. The patch is attached.
Comment 1 Sam Lantinga 2018-11-03 00:04:37 UTC 
Official builds are built with mingw-64, which doesn't generate PDB files.
Comment 2 Cameron Gutman 2018-11-03 00:22:16 UTC 
OK, fortunately SDL isn't hard to build, so I'll just ship my own MSVC builds with symbols.

In the long term, I think it would be nice though to move to MSVC as the default compiler for official Windows builds, since it has more advanced platform security and performance features like Control Flow Guard, Whole Program Optimization, plus PDBs of course. I don't know how many developers use those builds vs. the ones provided in Steam vs. local builds though.