[Gdb] debug level versus size

[Bahadir Balban]

Hi, 

I have a buggy executable and to figure out the bug I needed to use a
stack trace. For this purpose I compiled my application with debug
support but the exe size is 94,5MB compared to optimised one that is
7,4MB. Unfortunately I cannot run it now due to insufficient memory.

What flags/configure options should I use to get an exe capable of
giving a meaningful stack trace with a smaller binary size?

I used the following configure options for the large debug-enabled binary:

# code generation options (optimize for size)
#ac_add_options --enable-optimize=-Os
#ac_add_options --enable-strip
#ac_add_options --disable-debug
ac_add_options  --enable-debug
#ac_add_options --enable-reorder
#ac_add_options --enable-elf-dynstr-gc

#ac_add_options --disable-dtd-debug
ac_add_options --enable-dtd-debug                   # ENABLE DTD DEBUG
ac_add_options --disable-logging
ac_add_options --disable-tests

# enable static build (exists for both debug and non-debug)
ac_add_options --disable-shared
ac_add_options --enable-static

which resulted in the following flags during compilation: 

-DDEBUG -D_DEBUG -D_DEBUG_root -D_TRACING and -g.

Many thanks,
Bahadir