To -g or not to -g? (was: egcs build report)

[Gerald Pfeifer <pfeifer at dbai dot tuwien dot ac dot at>]

This discussion ceased without any clear decision. Now that 1.1 is
approaching quickly I think we should consider this again.

Personally I second Mark's suggestion of de-defaulting -g (except for
libraries), but then it was me to trigger this sub-thread. ;-)  

Gerald

PS: Note that Mark even volunteered to make that changes!


On Fri, 19 Jun 1998, Mark Mitchell wrote:
> This is clearly a debate with many reasonable points of view.  I'll
> just offer mine, without intending criticism of anyone else's.
> 
> In my experience, working for a commercial entity that used gcc, but
> not on Linux, few binary distributions were available.  None were
> available for many of the platforms we needed, like NCR MP-RAS, and
> those available even for mainstream Solaris were not of recent
> vintage.
> 
> I think many commercial UNIX users install and build GCC themselves.
> Because of fixincludes, one must in fact do this for minor revisions
> of the OS.  We used to have separate Solaris installations for 2.4,
> 2.5, and 2.5.1 since we built on each of these different machines.
> 
> Thus, the extra disk space *was* noticeable.  We stripped binaries
> before installing them.
> 
>     >> Could it make sense not to include -g for releases?
> 
>     Joe> This has not traditionally done to help convey the sense that
>     Joe> free software/open source is not simply a freebie, it is an
>     Joe> effort that people can contribute to.
> 
> That's true.  On the other hand, we have had such success as GNU
> developers (and we are to be congratulated for it!) that people who
> are just users, and not hackers, are using our products.  We should be
> proud of this; it indicates that our products are useful and usable.
> However, there are now many people dowloading, building, and
> installing software who have no desire to debug it.
> 
> Users should not have to understand anything about compilers in order
> to download and build software; I'd rather they didn't even have to
> understand the notion of `debugging information'.
> 
>     Joe> GNUware has always been done this way.  Considering that disk
>     Joe> prices are now about 1/100th of what they were when this
>     Joe> policy began, I don't think it's a problem.
> 
> Our NFS servers got full, so I do think it's a problem.
> 
>     Joe> A compromise might be to include in the installation
>     Joe> instructions "If you're really short on disk space and not
>     Joe> competent to help us debug, do xyz".  Proper instruction
>     Joe> should be given!  As g++ FAQ maintainer, I don't want to
> 
> At a minimum we should do this.
> 
> I suggest that the autoconf defaults should be changed from `-g -O2'
> to `-O2'.  Then, there should be an --enable-debugging (or similar)
> flag to turn on -g, and, for ease of use by all of us full-time
> hackers, an environment variable we could set to tell configure we
> want the old behavior.  I'm willing to implement the autoconf hacks,
> if we agree this is thing to do.
> 
> Note that I'm suggesting we do this for *all* packages, not just gcc.