Re: binaries not stripped in NetBSD 2.0?

From: Igor Sobrado (igor_at_no-spam.on.the.net)
Date: 12/09/04 

Date: 9 Dec 2004 18:11:04 +0100

Karsten Kruse <tecneeq@gmx.net> wrote:
>
> I agree. You should write a bugreport with send-pr(1) if this is not
> mentioned before. Check it here:
> http://www.netbsd.org/Misc/query-pr.html#search

Hi Karsten!

James Chacon gave us a very good feedback on this issue. Extra bits
are not debugging information but symbol information. It is useful
for tracing binaries and does not increase the size of the operating
system a lot.

This is my reply to his comment about the PR. I will copy the
email I sent here, because latest replies to other PRs never arrived
to the PRs database (an issue with my MUA, nmh??? Who knows!)

-------------------
Comments: In-reply-to James Chacon <jmc@NetBSD.org>
         message dated "Thu, 09 Dec 2004 10:21:36 -0600."

> On Thu, Dec 09, 2004 at 07:21:00AM +0000, igor@string1.ciencias.uniovi.es wrote:
>
> The file don't have debugging information in them (they aren't built w. -g).
>
> All stripping will do at this point is remove the rest of the symbol
> information which makes getting stack traces from potential core dumps fairly
> useless. It's adding no real overhead to the system and retaining that
> symbol data is still useful. It's not the same as "debugging information".

Hi James!

I was not aware about this fact, I did not run gdb(1) on them. As
symbol information was missing in earlier releases, I supposed it
was a mistake on the compilation process.

Now, it is obvious to me that the symbol information will help users
providing higher quality feedback on the operating system errors.
I am glad to see that this feature is available. I hope that this
information will help improving the operating system quality
even more!

Please, close the PR. Nice to know that those extra bits are
a feature, and not a mistake. Indeed, there is a big difference
in providing symbols for support tracing binaries and the full
source code for debugging.

Cheers,
Igor.