lack of symbol tables in sgi distributions

Geoff Collyer geoff at utstat.uucp
Mon Sep 17 17:52:17 AEST 1990


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.
-- 
Geoff Collyer		utzoo!utstat!geoff, geoff at utstat.toronto.edu



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