* Vasudev Kamath <kamathvasudev@gmail.com>, 2012-11-13, 20:13:
Not sure why it was removed, it was not present when I took over source from Micahel. After reading man page for *ld* I see that this option is used to strip of debugging symbols of the binaries. By removing these tools will contain the debugging symbols so I'm not sure how to fix this? The policy 10.1 says symbols should be stripped off with -s to install also section 4.9.1 says about nostrip option does this mean by default debhelper strips of symbols?What did this line do, and why it was removed? find . -name config.mk | xargs sed -i 's,-s ${LIBS},${LIBS},'
Yes, dh_strip strips symbols by default (if DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=nostrip is not set).
Using -s unconditionally is a bad idea, because then symbols are getting stripped even with nostrip.
Of course modifying upstream files in-place in debian/rules is probably a bad idea. (If you wanted do that, you'd have to restore the original ones in the clean target.)
Also note that this is slightly broken: ${LIBS} is expanded by make to an empty string, so you actually end up calling:
find . -name config.mk | xargs sed -i 's,-s ,,' -- Jakub Wilk