Prague GCC folks meeting summary report

[Richard Guenther]

On Thu, 1 Oct 2009, Joe Buck wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 01, 2009 at 05:00:10PM -0700, Andi Kleen wrote:
> > Richard Guenther <rguenther@suse.de> writes:
> > >
> > > The wish for more granular and thus smaller debug information (things like
> > > -gfunction-arguments which would properly show parameter values
> > > for backtraces) was brought up.  We agree that this should be addressed at a
> > > tools level, like in strip, not in the compiler.
> > 
> > Is that really the right level? In my experience (very roughly) -g can turn gcc from
> > CPU bound to IO bound (especially considering distributed compiling appraches),
> > and dropping unnecessary information in external tools would make the IO penalty even
> > worse.
> 
> Certainly life can suck when building large C++ apps with -g in an NFS
> environment.  Assuming we can generate tons of stuff and strip it later
> might not be best.

The agreement was based on the fact that 1) full debuginfo is necessary
anyway (for -debuginfo packages) 2) we don't want to build a package
multiple times just to get different levels of retained debug information.
So the way it will work is that -debuginfo package generation will
strip all but the pieces that should be retained in the binary.

To make the above work first the external tools have to add the 
capabilities, just implementing it in GCC doesn't work for us.

Richard.