Re: HEADS-UP: Enabling WITH_DEBUG_FILES by default

On 11 February 2015 at 23:23, Ian Lepore <ian_at_freebsd.org> wrote:
>
> I can't imagine that anybody is going to be happy with an installed
> system size increase from 520 to 2520 MB no matter how much it helps
> debugging, especially considering the the typical installation media is
> in the 2-8 GB range (with lots of 2 and 4 GB cards out there because
> that's what vendors bundle with the boards).

This change will have almost(*) no effect on the size of a default
installation from FreeBSD releases, or the size of those releases (CD
or memstick images). The plan is that the debug files will be
available as package sets that can be installed on demand, but in
order to do so the debug data needs to be built and stored at the time
the release is built.

I say "almost" no effect because the installed binaries grow by a
trivial amount with the addition of a .gnu_debuglink section and note.
For illustration here are the file sizes of ls, files in the objdir
unless otherwise noted:

# no debug
ls                44465
ls (installed)    31920

# with debug
ls.full           89401
ls.debug          60145
ls                40344
ls (installed)    32016