Subject: [bug#42555] [PATCH core-updates] build-system/gnu: strip with --strip-unneeded

From: Jakub Kądziołka <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 2020 01:38:50 +0200

Apart from debug information, one can also strip some symbols. This can
be a significant difference, qtbase:out consists of about 5 MB of those
symbols. As per [1], --strip-debug is included in --strip-unneeded, and
the debug files created also contain a copy of the information removed
by --strip-unneeded.

Linux From Scratch suggests that this option shouldn't be used on static
libraries [2], however other sources [3] indicate otherwise. Building a
toolchain with this patch succeeds, and the result works fine for
'gcc -static hello-world.c'.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/52555093
[2]: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/9.1/chapter05/stripping.html
[3]: https://www.technovelty.org/linux/stripping-shared-libraries.html

* guix/build/gnu-build-system.scm (strip): Use --strip-unneeded.
---
 guix/build/gnu-build-system.scm | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/guix/build/gnu-build-system.scm b/guix/build/gnu-build-system.scm
index 2e7dff2034..d3347c9518 100644
--- a/guix/build/gnu-build-system.scm
+++ b/guix/build/gnu-build-system.scm
@@ -425,7 +425,7 @@ makefiles."
                 (objcopy-command (if target
                                      (string-append target "-objcopy")
                                      "objcopy"))
-                (strip-flags '("--strip-debug"
+                (strip-flags '("--strip-unneeded"
                                "--enable-deterministic-archives"))
                 (strip-directories '("lib" "lib64" "libexec"
                                      "bin" "sbin"))
-- 
2.27.0