large binary, why not strip ?

[Matthew Seaman]

Masoom Shaikh wrote:
> most of the programs installed from ports have large binary size on disk
> 
> stripping em all reduces their size dramatically
> 
> I cannot see the reason for not stripping them by default ?
> 
> do I miss anything ?

Yes.  Binaries installed from the ports system /are/ already stripped
by default.  The official position is given here:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/install.html#INSTALL-STRIP

In practice it seems there are some exceptions -- this is what I found 
in /usr/local/bin on my machine (and pretty much everything in 
/usr/local/bin was installed from ports):

happy-idiot-talk:/usr/local/bin:% file * | grep ', not stripped' | cut -f 1 -d:
a2p
adnsheloex
adnsresfilter
cancel
cupstestdsc
cupstestppd
derb
dkim-stats
dkim-testkey
dkim-testssp
dumpreg
encode_keychange
fixnt
genbrk
gencnval
genctd
genrb
gocr
lp
lpoptions
lppasswd
lpq
lpr
lprm
lpstat
makeconv
nmap
omshell
openssl
pdfimage
php
php-cgi
pkgdata
restorefont
restorepalette
restoretextmode
snmpbulkget
snmpdelta
snmpdf
snmpnetstat
snmptable
snmpusm
snmpvacm
sqlite3
swig
swig1.3
tclsh8.4
uconv
wish8.4
workmanir

Arguably the fact that these programs aren't stripped is a bug that
should be reported to the port maintainers.  As far as I know, there
is no circumstance where a binary has to be left unstripped in order
to operate correctly, other than when it is required to run it under
gdb(1).  Hmmm.... that's something the ports build system should 
probably check on and complain about.

On the other hand, compare that to the number of binaries that are
stripped:

happy-idiot-talk:/usr/local/bin:% file * | grep ', stripped' | wc -l 
    1206

	Cheers,

	Matthew

-- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                   7 Priory Courtyard
                                                  Flat 3
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey     Ramsgate
                                                  Kent, CT11 9PW

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