Why do we strip server binaries?

[Stefan Bader]

On 05/03/2011 07:41 AM, 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.
> 
Speaking for the kernel only, that tiny gain is about 500MB compared to around
30MB. There simply would not be a server CD if we did not strip...

-Stefan

> 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.
>