[Gllug] Getting technical about email

[Philip Hands]

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Mike Brodbelt wrote:
> Nix wrote:
>> Debug symbols are stored in sections which are not mapped to segments,
>> so they are never loaded (except by the debugger, which digs around
>> inside the binary directly, using libbfd).
> 
> That's interesting - I'd assumed they were mapped. In that case their
> only negative would be the disk overhead, and presumably a small
> (probably insignificant) performance degradation due to the ELF loader
> doing its thing?

You will probably be interested in this explanation of the -dbg packages

  http://lists.netisland.net/archives/plug/plug-2006-02/msg00046.html

I should have been a little more verbose, the Debian -dbg packages contain
_only_ the debug symbols, so you get the best of both worlds for packages
that have them, you can save disk space, but if you need the symbols
they're a single apt-get away, and since you're not rebuilding anything,
your coredump should work fine even if you install the -dbg package after
the event.

As for the "it's not that significant an amount of space, so let's leave
them in" I'll again cite evolution as an example -- it's -dbg package is
over 6MB packaged, 14.9MB installed -- that's as against the stripped
package's 2.4MB & 7.6MB respectively.

Now, it's possible that the -dbg packages contain some duplication of data,
but I seriously doubt that an un-stripped package would be smaller that the
- -dbg package, and it's probably closer to the addition of the two sizes.
(obviously, I've not tried that to find out -- I leave that as an exercise
to the reader ;-)

Cheers, Phil.
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