Would be nice if the gitian build, when stripping, wrote the symbols to an external file (see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/866721/how-to-generate-gcc-debug-symbol-outside-the-build-target ).
We get quite a lot of crashdumps, core files, for OSX, Windows and Linux. These generally contain addresses, but not symbols. A recent one is #7765.
This is because the executables are stripped w/ make install_strip, but also because OSX/Windows doesn’t understand gdb’s symbol format even if it did include them. We don’t want to ship debug symbols with every download (it’d waste a lot of space and bitcoin.org server bandwidth - remember we’re static linking every executable, and have quite a lot of executables, and static linking gives lots of symbols, for every executable you have all the dependency symbols as well - and c++ symbols like from boost are huuuge).
Currently we have to hack the descriptor (change install_strip to install, possible hack in -g) to make an executable with symbols to use addr2line etc. This is extra work every time (in #7582 I went through the trouble, for ex.). Would be nice to just have the symbol files available after a build. I don’t plan on uploading these files with releases. But for developers doing their own gitian build, they’d be extremely useful for troubleshooting problems reported with releases and RCs.
