Re: RFC: Support for separate debug info files

[Jim Blandy <jimb at redhat dot com>]

Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@mvista.com> writes:

> On Wed, Jun 11, 2003 at 08:36:29AM -0500, Jim Blandy wrote:
> > 
> > Nick Clifton <nickc@redhat.com> writes:
> > >   This leads me to my main point.  Do we need the ability to create
> > >   stripped debuginfo files ?  The original patch did this, but it
> > >   turns out to be problematical since the debuginfo files need to
> > >   contain dummy versions of the .text, .data, etc sections.  Doing
> > >   this, rather than just stripping them out, looked non-trivial, so I
> > >   decided to skip it for this version.
> > > 
> > >   My theory is that the only benefit gained by being able to ship a
> > >   stripped debuginfo file as opposed to an unstripped one is that it
> > >   reduces the shipping size, making a distribution smaller.  I am
> > >   assuming that hard disk space is not really an issue, just the size
> > >   of the shipped binaries.
> > 
> > I think the idea is to omit the debug info files altogether from the
> > distribution.  It'll make the debug info packages take longer to
> > download, but it's not a show-stopper, I think.
> 
> For me it probably is a show-stopper - the issue is not download time
> or disk space, but CD size.  Duplicating all the binaries we want to
> provide debug info for would probably push us over the edge.  It could
> be done separately though!  This will at least let us test it...

Actually, CD size is the issue for Red Hat, too (not that our problems
are the only ones important to solve well).  It's just that Red Hat
doesn't include the debuginfo packages on the CD's at all, so we don't
care how big they are.

We used to ship executables with no debugging info, so shipping
executables with debug links is a step up for us.  If you used to ship
executables with debugging info, then just shipping debug links would
be a step down for you.