JDK-8036003: Add variable not to separate debug information.

[Andrew Hughes]

----- Original Message -----
> On 3/3/14 2:49 PM, Omair Majid wrote:
> > * David Holmes <david.holmes at oracle.com> [2014-02-28 18:48]:
> >> There are three pieces to all of this:
> >>
> >> 1. Generating debug symbols in the binaries (via gcc -g or whatever)
> >> 2. Generating debuginfo files (zipped or not) (FDS)
> >> 3. Stripping debug symbols from the binaries (strip-policy)
> >>
> >> It may be that we don't have clean separation between them, and if so
> >> that should be fixed, but I don't see the current proposal as the way
> >> forward.
> > Any chance we could clean up the names too? It's not obvious to me why
> > FDS means 'generating debuginfo files'.
> 
> FDS stands for Full Debug Symbols and is defined that way in
> quite a few Makefiles... We just call it FDS for short...
> 

At least to me, Full Debug Symbols suggests #1 (i.e. that symbols are generated
in the binaries), not #2. That's why it sounded so odd to me when you suggested
turning it off, when we discussed this before.

It's also not clear why you'd want a situation where #3 would be turned off, but
not #2, as you end up with two copies of the debug symbols. That's the problem
I believe we have with our builds; we can turn the stripping off, but then we
end up with duplicate debug information.

Do we need more than just the following three alternatives?

#1. No debugging information at all.
#2. Debugging information left in the original binaries.
#3. Debugging information stripped from the binaries and zipped in separate files.

It sounds to me like Oracle want #3, while distros want #2 and I imagine some
end users may just want #1 for a faster, smaller build.
-- 
Andrew :)

Free Java Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com)

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