lack of symbol tables in sgi distributions

[Dave Olson]

In <1990Sep17.075217.18381 at utstat.uucp> geoff at utstat.uucp (Geoff Collyer) writes:

| I note with displeasure that SGI ships binaries stripped of symbol
| tables, presumably to save scarce and expensive bytes on disk (:-), and
| not merely to make miserable the lives of users who lack source.  
| Given the ever-dropping prices of disks and the utility of symbol tables
| (e.g. for giving stack traces of misbehaving programs to the hotline,
| or for patching global variables), is there any reason for SGI to
| continue shipping stripped binaries?  I realise that COFF symbol tables
| can get large, but even minimal symbol tables (i.e. not enough for
| source-language debugging) would help.

There are many reasons for shipping stripped binaries, depending
on who you talk to (few of the companies I have worked for have ever
shipped unstripped binaries), but certainly disk spaces is a large
one.

MIPS compilers generate LARGE symbol tables.  In a not atypical case,
here are the sizes of /bin/csh on my machine, stripped, and
unstripped:
	-rwxr-xr-x   1 olson    engr      367280 Aug  9 10:10 csh
	-rwxr-xr-x   1 olson    engr      221184 Sep 17 07:43 csh
Note that 40% of the file is removed by stripping it...

While it is true that most of customers are now buying larger
disk drives, telling them to add another 100 Mb or so, just
so binaries could be patched wouldn't go over to well!  After
all, we like to think we don't ship TOO many buggy programs :).
--

	Dave Olson

Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code.