Need Debug Symbol (PDB) for Windows platform

[kexuelou]

Hey Guys,
Just noticed node.pdb was not shipped with the official node release. Can we please bring this back?

This is extremely helpful for postmortem debugging node application on windows platform. I don't like to build whole node because just want the PDB file.

thanks,
Wei

[mscdex]

/cc @nodejs/build

[rvagg]

We haven't shipped this since io.js v1, including Node.js v4 and v5 and this is the first complaint. I'd like to understand how useful this file really is. /cc @nodejs/platform-windows

[ofrobots]

It is useful to have the pdb symbol files available for debugging. If the installer size is a concern, we could make the pdb files separately downloadable.

[jbergstroem]

What size are we talking about?

[davidebbo]

I don't think the PDBs should be included in the main installer. But it would indeed be useful to have them available as a separate download. e.g. they could be dropped in https://nodejs.org/dist/v5.8.0/win-x86/ (and x64).

[whitlockjc]

I've not been on Windows in a while but last I remember, some installers gave you the option to install PDBs or not while going through the installation wizard. I think that would be ideal, the option to choose. Now if omitting PDBs has been done due to saving some download size, this suggestion would violate that and would likely not be a good suggestion. Like @jbergstroem, I too would be interested in knowing the size impact for including the PDBs both for on-disk and over the wire.

[bnoordhuis]

The PDB for v0.12.12 is about 32 MB. I wager that makes it too big to ship as an optional part of the installer but it could be made available as a separate download.

Looking at common.gypi, I think we still generate it as part of the build, we just don't distribute it anymore ('DebugInformationFormat': 3, which translates to /Zi.) I don't have a Windows machine on hand to test but there should be a Release/node.exe.pdb after a successful build.

[joaocgreis]

The PDB for current master is 62 MB (compresses to 17 MB zip and 11 MB 7z).

[ofrobots]

Actually, if we are doing this, we should generalize this to other platforms too (see: https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Separate-Debug-Files.html).

[kexuelou]

This is required specially for post mortem debugging. Another concern here is even I build nodejs myself, I can't find the v8dbg_* symbols which is helpful for debugging jscript objects.

[jbergstroem]

I don't Windows much but I'd argue that file size suggests a separate download.