Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utstat!geoff
From: geoff@utstat.uucp (Geoff Collyer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
Subject: lack of symbol tables in sgi distributions
Message-ID: <1990Sep17.075217.18381@utstat.uucp>
Date: 17 Sep 90 07:52:17 GMT
Organization: Statistics, U. of Toronto
Lines: 11

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@utstat.toronto.edu