Default value for -with_native_debug_symbols on Windows useful?

[Thomas Stüfe]

Hi all,

I could reframe the subject matter as "how do you internally at Oracle
build the Windows JDK"?

I had several discussions with people from Oracle about missing callstacks
in hs-err files on Windows generated in tests which run at Oracle.

I recently did JDK-8185712, which improves the Windows symbol decoder, so I
feel somewhat responsible. However, I was never able to reproduce anything
- here at SAP, we get nice callstacks and all works well.

A simple explanation may be that you at Oracle either remove the debug info
(pdb files) from the images before testing and/or build
with -with_native_debug_symbols=zipped . The latter zips the pdb files,
which in that form are useless. Which is it?

For that matter, do you think -with_native_debug_symbols=zipped makes sense
on Windows? Would it not make more sense to make the default
-with_native_debug_symbols=external on Windows, to have pdb files ready for
debugging and testing?

Thanks, Thomas