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Comment by jcastro | Hacker News Reader

The blog post could be titled "Why the Linux distribution model is totally broken for end user software".

As a linux user I appreciate the work, but it's tough to read this blog post and not think about the wasted effort that could be used to fix the bugs in the upstream software itself.

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Really? Because I just think about how impossible this would be on Windows, where shared or external libs are inscrutable, as are OS build chains, version differences, etc etc.

We do gather symbol information on Windows too, but it's a lot less detailed than what we get from Linux. It also requires jumping through a lot of hoops. For example we get minimal information from Windows graphics drivers and we have to semi-manually scrape them ourselves.

To get symbols for basically any MS library I just add the official MS symbol server to my symbol search list. Chrome has one too, there's no real reason other vendors couldn't do it. You can also just ship a .pdb file next to your binaries, and I think the only good reasons for not doing that are keeping download sizes small (use a symbol server...) or paranoid secrecy.

For example, NVIDIA's windows drivers are like 600mb at this point yet they don't even include function name symbols. It's inexcusable.

Has Windows ever broken Firefox? Do you think it's more or less likely to happen in Windows (or Mac) or Linux?

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