On Mittwoch 17 Februar 2010, Enrico Weigelt wrote: > For example, debugging information doesnt need to exist within the > binary itself. An external file would be fine, too, and allows > removing them by standard file operations.
man make.conf: splitdebug Prior to stripping ELF etdyn and etexec files, the debugging info is stored for later use by various debuggers. This feature is disabled by nostrip. For installation of source code, see installsources. http://phajdan-jr.blogspot.com/2010/02/how-to-get-useful-backtraces-almost- for.html http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/qa/backtraces.xml With splitdebug enabled, Portage will still strip the binaries installed in the system. But before doing that, all the useful debug information is copied to a ".debug" file, which is then installed inside /usr/lib/debug (the complete name of the file would be given by appending to that the path where the file is actually installed). The path to that file is then saved in the original file inside an ELF section called ".gnu_debuglink", so that gdb knows which file to load the symbols from. for someone so highly critical you should do some more reading.