Bug#662998: debian-policy: stripping static libraries

[Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net>]

On Fri, 28 Feb 2014 19:13:15 +0100 Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net> wrote:
> On 2014-02-28 19:05, Bastien ROUCARIES wrote:
> > I could do some work if you point me thé branch
> > 
> > Bastien
> > [...]
> 
> It is the branch from [1]; needs to be rebased on top of a recent
> version of Lintian.
> 
> ~Niels
> 
> [1]
> http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=users/nthykier/lintian.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/strip-static-lib
> 

This has been deployed as two experimental tags in lintian[1].

 * unstripped-static-library (198 packages, 117207 tags)
 * static-library-has-unneeded-section (2797 packages, 629705 tags)

Packages using dh_strip will until yesterday have emitted
static-library-has-unneeded-section.  But the new version of debhelper
will now properly strip these sections as well.

As for the "extreme" number of tags (per package): This is caused by
Lintian emitted a tag for each object file inside the static lib (x2 as
it checks two architectures).


Assuming we currently have 40 000 binary packages in the archive, we are
dealing with:

 * At most 7.0% packages with 1 or more partially stripped static
   library
 * At most 0.5% packages with 1 or more completely unstripped

Since the 7% almost certainly comes from packages using dh_strip, I
think it is fairly safe to add stripping of static libraries as a
"SHOULD" at this point.

Thanks,
~Niels

[1] https://lintian.debian.org/tags.html

I *cannot* recommend that you click the links for the particular tags.
They are rather large given the number of tags.