Subject: bug#2507: 23.0.91; Stripping emacs.exe on MS-Windows produces an invalid program

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 01 Mar 2009 19:15:24 +0200

> From: Harald Maier <[email-masked]>
> Cc: [email-masked]
> Date: Sun, 01 Mar 2009 07:01:27 +0100
> 
> > One further idea to ponder is that the fact we now compile with
> > DWARF-2 debug info is the reason for the problem with stripping the
> > dumped Emacs.  Can someone please try rebuilding with "-gstabs"
> > instead of "-gdwarf-2 -g3", and see if that produces an emacs.exe
> > which can be safely stripped?
> 
> I tried the "-gstabs" debug info, but after stripping it didn't work
> too.

Thanks for trying.

> But the output size of that compilation and linking is far smaller.
> 
> Result: 12.55 MB (-gstabs) instead of 31.33 MB (-gdwarf2 -g3).

This is expected: DWARF-2 produces much more voluminous debug
information (and thus enables several useful debugging features in
GDB).

Btw, the 32MB executable is only that large on disk; when you invoke
it, the debug info is not read at all, so the memory footprint of a
running Emacs is not affected.  The debug info is read only by GDB
when you run Emacs under the debugger.

(I'm not saying that we should ignore this problem, just that it only
matters for disk space and the size of the tarball.)