Why do we strip server binaries?

[Chow Loong Jin]

On 03/05/2011 13:41, Clint Byrum wrote:
> 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.

I haven't had an issue that hasn't been resolved with -dbgsym packages so far,
but then again I don't use oprofile.

On the other hand, however, surely it's not a bug in the way we strip packages,
but a bug in oprofile and other $random_tools for not supporting the external
debug symbols?

-- 
Kind regards,
Loong Jin

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