Include debug symbols in Windows build

[realityexists]

I'm currently troubleshooting a query that causes PostgreSQL to crash, running on Windows. postgis-2.0.dll is in the stack trace, but I have no debug symbols for it, so I can't get a proper stack trace. It would be useful to package .PDB files for all PostGIS DLLs in the Windows installer .EXE and .ZIP files. Ideally, the installer would put them into the PostgreSQL "symbols" directory, which is where .PDB files for PostgreSQL itself are installed.

[pramsey]

Probably not,

 http://windbg.info/forum/12-symbol-and-source-files-/21-debugging-mingwgcc-built-dll-in-visual-studio.html

The windows builds are made with MinGW, nobody is building a pure MSVC PostGIS at this time. So if you build out the whole stack, on mingw you can debug in gdb, but I don't see any way you could debug is MSVC.

[realityexists]

Oh, right - I didn't realise .pdb files don't even exist for PostGIS, I thought they just weren't included. Then the next question is: how can I get a backtrace from the downloaded Windows binaries (without building PostGIS on Windows myself)?

[robe]

FWIW: I'm packaging a mingw64 standalone tarball that hopefully will just require and extract and go with it. It will have all the dependencies in place and already compiled for you (including gdb) so you can go straight to compiling postgis and debugging. Hoping to have all this ready (at least for 64-bit) in the next week or so and then later another for 32-bit with the mingw-64 chain.

Thanks to all the folks that contributed to our "build windows 64-bit postgis" pledge drive.

[realityexists]

Thanks. I ended up reproducing it on Linux (#1658) and the cause is pretty simple in this case, but being able to get stack traces on Windows may be useful in other cases.

[robe]

I'm not sure if this is doable until we have a VC++ build.