[Gllug] Getting technical about email

[Nix]

On 11 Nov 2006, Mike Brodbelt outgrape:

> Philip Hands wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> That's very cool. I hadn't realised you could have the symbols entirely
> separated from the binaries.

Technically you can't. The symbols *are* in binaries: they're just
binaries with no sections other than debug sections :) GDB is happy to
treat these as if they were the real thing (well, except that it can't
run them, of course, but it's fine for post-mortem debugging).

>> 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.
>
> Ow. Apart from the disk space, clearly the bandwidth use for Debian
> mirrors would be much worse if packages were unstripped by default....

Debug data compresses very well indeed.

-- 
Rich industrial heritage: lifeless wasteland. `The land
north of Mordor has a rich industrial heritage.'
-------------- next part --------------
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug