Octaviz, VTK, & Octave CMAKE???

[Jarod Wilson]

On Wed, 2008-08-06 at 12:26 -0400, Ben Scott wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 11:52 AM, Jarod Wilson <jarod at wilsonet.com> wrote:
> >> Why wouldn't I want the debug-info package installed?
> >> Because it is useless for most folks?
> >
> > Yep. Only really needed if you're debugging the app itself.
> 
>   What do those packages actually contain/do, anyway?
> 
>   I never cared enough to look it up, but since we're on the subject
> anyway... :)

Red Hat and Fedora build all their binary packages with debug symbols
enabled[*]. That adds quite a bit of bloat to the size of various
things, but is required to be able to actually run a program under
something like gdb and get meaningful results. To remedy the bloat,
elfutils is run at the conclusion of the build, and strips out the debug
symbols and whatnot, leaving us with package foo that is reasonably
sized, which can still be combined with foo-debuginfo to provide full
debugging support. Its very rare that end-users actually need any
debuginfo packages, its more of a developer thing and/or data collection
for bug reporting.

[*] I think SUSE does too, as should most any RPM-based distro, as its
part of the default RPM build environment. Seems to be opt-in for
Debian-based distros though. Not sure beyond that.



-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com