[hacknews] don't strip system programs

henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (10/25/83)

We've run for a long time with a de facto policy (inherited from Bell)
of stripping the symbol table off all system binaries.  The only useful
effect this has is to reduce disk use in places like /bin.  Unfortunately,
it also has some harmful effects, notably the lack of a symbol table when
some system program suddenly requires investigation with adb.  We have a
fair bit of space to go around on root, and /bin is not all that large
to begin with, so an increase of (say) 50% would have little impact.  So,
as an experiment, system policy is changed.  Take the "-s" out of the cc
commands in your Makefiles.  There will be no global recompilations at
this time; it would be nice to get symbol tables on all of /bin, but it's
too big a job just now.  We'll let things pick up symbol tables as they
are recompiled, for the moment.

I have cleaned the -s's out of $cmd/cmake, which makes most of the system
programs which have only a single source file.  I have not tackled the
Makefiles for the various larger programs, because it's too big a job to
do all at once.  When you work on something like that, get rid of the -s.
Someday in the future we'll do a sweep to look for leftover -s's.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry