Re: reword documentation about symbol stripping

[John Calcote]

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. Only in the last 10 years has Linux become generally
popular. Before that time, it and all the software that ran on it were
pretty much relegated to programmers. 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.

In any case, it makes complete sense why the GNU standards were written
this way when you understand the history.

John

On 11/21/2010 12:25 PM, MK wrote:
> On Sun, 21 Nov 2010 17:44:10 +0100
> Ralf Wildenhues <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Oh well.  This thread has been so noisy and unproductive, maybe we
>> should seize the opportunity to take a bit of good away from it.
>>
>> Karl, what do you think about this rewording (against the gnulib copy
>> of make-stds.texi) that makes the text slightly less subjective and
>> slightly less tongue-in-cheek?
> Wow-wee is that refreshing gang, thanks.  I do recognize that I could
> have done more of my own homework here, but: as a neophyte programmer,
> that is endlessly true (of an endless array of topics -- I think
> otherwise known as an "infinite regress"), and it is always nice to find
> something spelled out in a clear, concise manner. Then I can move on
> quickly to the next conundrum, rather than having to investigate some
> vague insinuation at every step, potentially wasting other people's
> time in the process.
>
>> May we have a real name please to credit in the ChangeLog entry?
> I would be "Mark T. Eriksen".
>