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Re: reword documentation about symbol stripping


From: Miles Bader
Subject: Re: reword documentation about symbol stripping
Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2010 11:09:49 +0900

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.

-Miles

-- 
Politeness, n. The most acceptable hypocrisy.



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