Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] build: preserve debug symbols with --enable-debug-info

[Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>]

Il 25/09/2014 12:49, Stefan Hajnoczi ha scritto:
> On Thu, Sep 25, 2014 at 10:06:35AM +0200, Olaf Hering wrote:
>> During code review for xen I noticed that --enable-debug-info
>> would still strip the binaries because strip_opt= defaults to
>> yes. If --enable-debug-info is passed to configure it has to be
>> assumed that not only the compiled binaries have debugsymbols,
>> also the installed binaries should keep the symbols. The
>> requirement to pass also --disable-strip looks odd.
> 
> Perhaps package maintainers rely on installed binaries not having
> debug symbols?

If so, that should be taken care of by the distribution.

Of course, a distribution is free to separate the debug info and ship
it as a separate package; in that case, it makes sense to distribute
stripped binaries.

But I think discarding symbols on "make install" is in general a bad
idea, especially for long-lived processes such as QEMU where you often
have non-reproducible bugs.   If symbols are gone, even the simplest
bug becomes basically impossible to diagnose from a core dump.

The GNU Makefile standards have "make install" and "make
install-strip" targets.  It would be nice to add "make install-strip"
and at the same time flip the default from --enable-strip to
--disable-strip.

Paolo