-optl-s (strip) by default

[Duncan Coutts]

On Thu, 2008-09-18 at 13:54 +0100, Simon Marlow wrote:
> Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
> > Hello Don,
> > 
> > Friday, September 12, 2008, 12:54:22 PM, you wrote:
> > 
> >>> when GHC builds executable, it adds debug info by default. since this
> >> You can also achieve this by making sure your deployed programs build
> >> with Cabal,
> >> http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/cabal-devel/2008-March/002427.html
> >> No need to hack GHC's view of the linker.
> > 
> > btw, it seems like hack in 3rd party tool to fix weird default ghc behavior
> 
> It might be weird, but it's traditional.  Also the symbol information is 
> sometimes useful: for example on Linux Valgrind understands it and can tell 
> you which function has memory errors, or give you a profile (perhaps only 
> useful for people working on the RTS like me).

And some distros have a policy of managing striping themselves (and
making it a user preference and allowing either stripping, no stripping
or putting debug info in separate files on another part of the file
system). Yes it's true that that debug info is not usually useful for
Haskell progs like it is for C ones but just doing the same thing as
other packages makes life easier for those distros. So the ability to
turn it on/off easily when building is reasonably important and that's
exactly the situation we have now with Cabal packages. So I think it's
fine to leave the stripping feature there rather than pushing it lower
into ghc (as we'd still need to be able to turn it on/off).

Basically the status-quo is fine, imho.

Duncan