On Mittwoch 17 Februar 2010, Enrico Weigelt wrote:
> For example, debugging information doesnt need to exist within the
> binary itself. An external file would be fine, too, and allows
> removing them by standard file operations.
man make.conf:
splitdebug
Prior to stripping ELF etdyn and etexec files, the
debugging info is stored for later use by various debuggers. This
feature is disabled by nostrip. For installation of
source code, see installsources.
http://phajdan-jr.blogspot.com/2010/02/how-to-get-useful-backtraces-almost-
for.html
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/qa/backtraces.xml
With splitdebug enabled, Portage will still strip the binaries installed in
the system. But before doing that, all the useful debug information is copied
to a ".debug" file, which is then installed inside /usr/lib/debug (the complete
name of the file would be given by appending to that the path where the file is
actually installed). The path to that file is then saved in the original file
inside an ELF section called ".gnu_debuglink", so that gdb knows which file to
load the symbols from.
for someone so highly critical you should do some more reading.
