Re: Help with generating a stack trace on IIS6

Hannes Magnusson wrote:

Hi Sharad

I would appreciate if anyone can help me in finding out how to obtain extra information from php ... I am not able to find a debug pack for PHP 4 ....

The sad bit is, it's totally unnecessary to have a specific debug build, but the maintainers have never taken advantage of the fact. Leave /O options alone in the release build (optimize to your hearts' content), leave /MD for the run time, but compile with the /Zi flag (ensuring the sources don't clash with the output binary name, or else use /Fd"othername" to compile the sources with a different .pdb filename to avoid a collision), and finally link /debug /opt:ref. The result is the -same- .dll or .exe as the original release style, but an -external- .pdb matching the binary - which Dr. Watson or any other windows debugger can use and spit out backtraces. Windows Apache HTTP Server releases offer this; the corresponding .pdb's are zipped up in their very own package. Normally they don't help a user. But if the user is crashing, unzipping the .pdb files that correspond to their release provides all the backtrace info required. In fact, with the binaries + pdb's - the user.dmp crash file can be ripped open on a dev box which has the appropriate debugging tools, just like using an non-stripped unix binary with gdb. Bill