Tutorial: Getting debug information for PyQt wheels

[Florian Bruhin]

Hey!

You might have seen it before that you get a crash report without an
useful stacktrace because debug symbols are missing, as the user has
PyQt installed from wheels (or you have, because building QtWebEngine
from sources is a pain).

However, PyQt's wheels distribute Qt's binaries 1:1, and there's nothing
stopping you from using the debug symbols that Qt distributes with their
binaries with PyQt's wheels. I thought it would be more complex than
that, but it really isn't.

First, get debug symbols from Qt. You could use the Qt online
installer[1], aqtinstall[2] (but that can't get you QtWebEngine debug
symbols[3]), or maybe even download/extract the files manually[4].

Whatever you do, make sure you pick the version matching PyQt6-Qt6 and
PyQt6-WebEngine-Qt6 (see `pip list` or somesuch). Then find the `.debug`
files (e.g. `6.9.2/gcc_64/lib/Qt6Core.debug`) and copy them next to the
Qt binaries (e.g. `.venv/lib/python3.13/site-packages/PyQt6/Qt6/lib/`).

And that's all I needed to get useful stacktraces in `gdb` :)

Flo

[1] https://www.qt.io/download-qt-installer-oss
[2] https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall/
e.g. `aqt install-qt linux desktop 6.9.2 linux_gcc_64 -m debug_info`
[3] https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall/issues/945
[4] e.g. https://download.qt.io/online/qtsdkrepository/linux_x64/desktop/qt6_692/qt6_692/qt.qt6.692.debug_info.linux_gcc_64/
https://download.qt.io/online/qtsdkrepository/linux_x64/extensions/qtwebengine/692/x86_64/extensions.qtwebengine.692.debug_information/
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