How to maintain a large symbols file of a C++ library

[Thomas Weber <tweber@debian.org>]

Hi, 

I'm in the process of converting Debian's Octave packages into a
structure with proper library packaging. The symbols file of these three
C++ libraries has about 30k lines. 

I'm pretty new to symbols handling, so I'm looking for advice on
how to handle this. Is there a simple way to reduce the pure size of
this file? Or is this size normal?

Further, looking at dpkg-gensymbols(1), it seems I should take
special care about some C++-features - can you point me to an example of
how to do this?

Thanks
	Thomas