Debugging Official Builds (or, how cool is the Mozilla symbol server?)
Not infrequently, there are bugs filed in Mozilla by Smart People who want to help and who are experiencing an odd behavior or a bug. They want to help, but they really don’t want to spend the time to build Mozilla themself (and I really don’t blame them).
Now, at least on Windows, interested hackers have the ability to debug release builds of Firefox! Mozilla finally has its own symbol server which will provide debugging PDBs for nightly and release builds. See the Mozilla Developer Center for more information about using this new and exciting service. Note that this will only work for trunk builds from 1.9a5 forward, so it won’t be much help with our current Firefox 2.0.0.x release series. If you want to disable breakpad crash reporting and have crashes in nightly builds go straight to the Windows JIT debugging system, export MOZ_CRASHREPORTER_DISABLE=1 in your environment.
Kudos to Ted and Aravind for getting this set up.
June 12th, 2007 at 5:23 am
Whoa, this is cool :). For how many days (nightlies) will the symbol server provide symbols for older nightlies? Only for the current one (plus a few days backwards) or more?
June 12th, 2007 at 11:51 am
This is awesome! I can’t wait for FF 3.0.
June 13th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
mcsmurf: we’re kinda not cleaning up symbols currently, so they go back to 3.0a4pre right now. We will probably keep ~30 days once we implement symbol cleanup.
September 28th, 2007 at 12:43 pm
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