Why do we strip server binaries?

[Steve Langasek]

On Mon, May 02, 2011 at 10:41:10PM -0700, 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 current generation of detached debugging symbols appear to be 1.5x the
size of the stripped binaries themselves, on average.  This is actually
quite a bit better than it used to be when dwarf2 first appeared, but it's
still enough that I wouldn't call this a "tiny" gain.

Which is the more common case: installing Ubuntu from a CD, or profiling /
debugging a process after installation?

If you could only fit half the software on an install CD that we currently
do, which half would you cut?

> The -dbg packages help, but a) aren't mandatory,

No, but what are mandatory are -dbgsym packages which are autogenerated on
the Ubuntu autobuilders.  For some reason, these are missing for mysql-5.1
in natty.  Perhaps fixing this, along with improving our process for getting
dbgsyms packages into the hands of users
(https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/foundations-o-dbgsym-integration/),
would address this issue?

> and b) don't always help with things like oprofile which doesn't know
> about them.

So why doesn't oprofile know about them?  Detached symbols files are pretty
much The Way It's Done now; shouldn't oprofile be fixed to understand them?

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org