Why do we strip server binaries?

[Clint Byrum]

I had an interesting conversation with Baron Schwartz from Percona (author
of the 2nd edition of High Performance MySQL and Maatkit) at the MySQL
Users conference last month regarding what he feels distributions all
get wrong. One particular pet peeve of his is that we strip our binaries.

As Baron sees it, this is a *tiny* gain (smaller binaries for the CD)
for a giant loss, which is the loss of ability to profile and introspect
a critical piece of software while it is running and, perhaps more
importantly, while it is failing.

Its not enough to make it possible to correct the issue. As we all know,
you have to make the system friendly by default.

The -dbg packages help, but a) aren't mandatory, and b) don't always
help with things like oprofile which doesn't know about them.

I've personally run into this a few times in production usage where a
problem is particularly hard to wrap one's head around, and I always
ended up replacing my distro packages with something that was unstripped.