Re: why strip?
James LewisMoss writes:
> I've looked back at the debian-devel list archives and haven't found a
> thread dealing with this. Also the policy manual states the
> requirement, but doesn't give any clear reasons why.
>
> I'm wondering why the requirement to strip binaries/libraries? Also
Stripped binaries are much smaller than unstripped. We are also urged
to compile our files with '-O2' instead of '-g' which would include
some debug information.
The majority of Debian GNU/Linux users won't look at the source but
wants a neat distribution, easy to handle, easy to administer and
easy to upgrade. It wont' be a good idea to say that a debian
distribution is twice as big as any other because of unstripped
binaries.
Anyone who wants to debug files is able to fetch the source and
recompile it with -g and forget about the stripping.
> it is a rarity that anyone would link something statically. Is there
> any reason not to distribute static libs with debugging information
> intact? (would make debugging things easier. Under the current
> situation if I need to debug a program based on some library in my
> system I HAVE to go out and compile the source for myself. (Unless of
> course there is a separate debugging package for the lib which in most
> cases there is not.) Specifying debugging for static libs would solve
This is only a minority.
We have a libc5-dbg, what's in that one? Sounds like debug informtion,
does it help you?
> that problem. Not stripping shared libs would make debugging binaries
> linked with them much easier.
But would blow up Debian unnessesarily.
> I'm NOT trying to start a flame war here. I am curious why this
> decision was made. I'm sure there are good reasons, I would just
> like to know what they are. :)
I wonder, I never came to a step where I needed an unstripped library,
at least I don't remember.
Regards
Joey
--
/ Martin Schulze * joey@infodrom.north.de * 26129 Oldenburg /
/ http://home.pages.de/~joey/
/ Kernel-Patching in DOS? Selten so gelacht! -- Jochen Schoof /
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