Re: reword documentation about symbol stripping

[John Calcote]

On 11/21/2010 07:09 PM, Miles Bader wrote:
> John Calcote <address@hidden> writes:
>> You need to remember the original target audience of GNU software was
>> a group of people that wanted to share free software.  Most of them
>> were students or researchers that generally built software distributed
>> in source form.
> ...
>> That being the case, "users" were programmers, and programmers are
>> indeed helpless without debug symbols during a crash - that is, unless
>> you're one of those rare types that loves to dig into a good assembly
>> debug session.
> I think the basic goal is still quite valid though -- the point is not
> to _require_ that users be programmers, or even to _expect_ them to be,
> but to _enable_ them to go as far as they want to go.  So In cases where
> some extra power can be granted to the user at little cost, it's good to
> do so, even if many users never use that power.
>
> The concept of system utilities/libraries/etc of being "magic you're not
> supposed to touch or look at, even if you want to" has been a problem
> for decades, though the lines have shifted.

Don't get me wrong - I completely agree with you. I like this approach
personally but perhaps that just because I'm a programmer myself.
Regardless, there is always value in providing a lot of information (as
long as it doesn't get in the way of normal use - and it most definitely
doesn't in this case).

Additionally, in the open source community, where user feedback is
essential, its important to empower users to give you valuable
information about your product - such as stack traces with symbols. So
even if you don't debug problems yourself, you can hardly give good
crash reports without symbol information - especially in a situation
where the developer can't know the binary version well enough to apply
symbols to numeric addresses correctly every time (as the user may have
received his version of your program from any number of sources that may
have modified it themselves).

John