RFC: Support for separate debug info files

[Jim Blandy]

Nick Clifton <nickc@redhat.com> writes:
>   This leads me to my main point.  Do we need the ability to create
>   stripped debuginfo files ?  The original patch did this, but it
>   turns out to be problematical since the debuginfo files need to
>   contain dummy versions of the .text, .data, etc sections.  Doing
>   this, rather than just stripping them out, looked non-trivial, so I
>   decided to skip it for this version.
> 
>   My theory is that the only benefit gained by being able to ship a
>   stripped debuginfo file as opposed to an unstripped one is that it
>   reduces the shipping size, making a distribution smaller.  I am
>   assuming that hard disk space is not really an issue, just the size
>   of the shipped binaries.

I think the idea is to omit the debug info files altogether from the
distribution.  It'll make the debug info packages take longer to
download, but it's not a show-stopper, I think.