Time to stop stripping binaries?

[Garrett Cooper]

On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 5:08 PM, Adrian Chadd <adrian at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On 23 June 2010 02:09, Garrett Cooper <gcooper at freebsd.org> wrote:
>
>>> ISTR someone pointing out that there's a "magical" (ie, I don't
>>> understand it) way to optionally have debugging symbols as extra
>>> file(s), rather than having to ship extremely large shared libraries
>>> by default.
>>
>>    See this link:
>> http://old.nabble.com/-gcc--separate-debug-infos-td21591416.html .
>> It's similar to what I've seen some internal groups do before in the
>> past.
>
> People-who-know-the-build-system-well, how hard would it be to build
> libraries with this option?
>
> People-who-know-binutils-and-gdb-and-relevant-libraries-well, what
> magic needs to happen to teach programs about this? (eg gdb, gprof,
> pmcstat, etc?)

    Speaking only for gdb, it's trivial from a user perspective to
pick up the debug symbols:

add-symbol-file <debug-symbols> <addr>

    where <addr> is 0 for the application.
    IIRC there are modifications that people have made to gdb to pick
up debug symbols for libraries, but I'm a bit hazy here.
HTH,
-Garrett