On Tue, 2008-06-17 at 16:16 -0700, Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:
Here's something I just stumbled upon by accident: at least on Linux, GHC emits huge numbers of symbols into the binaries it generates. Here's Haddock, which I compiled without any funny debug options:
$ du -h haddock-0.9 4.1M haddock-0.9 $ nm haddock-0.9 | wc -l 37938 $ strip haddock-0.9 $ du -h haddock-0.9 2.7M haddock-0.9
I happened upon this because I'm repackaging GHC 6.8.3 for Fedora, and rpmlint complained that haddock was not stripped. The RPM packager automatically strips binaries using "strip -g", but that wasn't stripping any of the abovementioned symbols.
According to man strip, the -g flag means only strip debugging symbols. But ghc doesn't generate any debugging symbols (and ghc does not pass -g to gcc so nor does gcc). So it seems to me that it's not surprising that you still get all the symbols. What is a surprise is that rpm only uses strip -g when rpmlint seems to expect normal strip.
I don't know what the purpose of those symbols might be. Could someone fill me in, please? Can they actually be used for anything?
I don't think they're used for anything. Cabal-1.4 now strips executables by default upon installation (distros that want to do the strip themselves can disable this). Duncan