Clasen: Debugging a Flatpak application

Matthias Clasen looks at how to debug an application built into a Flatpak. Since the runtime environment for a Flatpak application is quite different than normal, even running GDB requires taking some different steps. "Now for the last trick: I was complaining about stacktraces without symbols at the beginning. In rpm-based distributions, the debug symbols are split off into debuginfo packages. Flatpak does something similar and splits all the debug information of runtimes and apps into separate "runtime extensions", which by convention have .Debug appended to their name. So the debug info for org.gnome.Recipes is in the org.gnome.Recipes.Debug extension.When you use the -devel option, flatpak automatically includes the Debug extensions for the application and runtime, if they are available. So, for the most useful stacktraces, make sure that you have the Debug extensions for the apps and runtimes in question installed."