Re: should static archives be stripped?

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>]

Florian Weimer writes:
> * Nicolas Boulenguez:
>
>> One day in the near future, all -dbg packages should be generated
>> automatically after upload [2]. The Ada policy may then forget
>> everything about -dbg packages.
>>
>> For now, we distribute an unstripped static archive with each Ada
>> library.  A new lintian tag [1] seems to show that we should start
>> stripping this archive.  This can easily be implemented for most
>> packages by changing only dh-ada-library.  Should I do that?
>
> I would be a bit surprised if you could use debuginfo separated from
> static libraries to debug statically linked binaries.  Is this really
> the case?

After re-reading the Debian Policy, I'm actually surprised it does not
require that static libraries carry debug info.  Maybe that was the case
in the past and has changed?

Anyway, I still prefer to include debug info into the executable; both
because of what Florian said but also because in the (rare) cases where
one really wants to link statically, one doesn't mind the extra disk
usage anyway, and knows how to strip the resulting executable, if
needed.  In a nutshell, debug info in static libraries brings potential
benefits but no real drawback, so let's keep it.

--
Ludovic Brenta.