On Jul 27, 2009, at 5:22 PM, David Kirkby wrote:
>
> I noticed that several packages build Sage with the -g option to ,
> which adds debugging information. This has 3 downsides
>
> 1) The binaries are slower
> 2) The binaries are bigger
> 3) Possibly takes longer to compile - I've not verified this, but I
> suspect it does.
Just a sec, is there any empirical evidence for the above? (1) seems
like the most severe, but as far as I understand, there is no speed
impact on the resulting binaries (it just generates symbol tables).
(2) seems like the biggest issue, but is is a 10% increase? Double
the size? More? Sage is big, but HD space is relatively cheap. As for
(3), it the only ones who care about this are those who compile from
source, and those are the ones more likely to want the debug symbols.
Again, some some hard numbers would be good.
I've found cases where it's very useful to be able to fire up gdb and
see where something's going on, often I don't now ahead of time where
I'm going to be looking for a segfault. Debugging symbols are
especially useful because it's open source, so one can actually see
the code in question (even if one has no intent on modifying it). I
think any step backwards in developer friendliness should be taken
with caution.
> I think it would be a good idea to remove the -g flag in general. As
> far as I am aware, there is the SAGE_DEBUG variable, which should be
> set to 1 for debugging. I'm doing this from memory, not testing it as
> I write, but
>
> #!/bin/bash
> debug="${SAGE_DEBUG-0}"
>
> if [ x$debug = "x1" ] ; then
> CFLAGS="$CFLAGS -g"
> fi
> should add -g only when the environment variable SAGE_DEBUG is set
> to 1.
As an alternative, what about using the strip command for bdist?
People who compile from source would get symbols, but the binary
downloads would be smaller for people who don't care.
- Robert
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel
URLs: http://www.sagemath.org
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
