Re: ‘strip’ phase

[Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org>]

ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org> skribis:
>
>>> I DO get a load of messages such as
>>>
>>>   strip:/gnu/store/icz59y35qqmm4jcrnkqx7d73xlzsq0lq-ruby-1.8.7-p374/lib/ruby/1.8/rexml/attlistdecl.rb:
>>>   File format not recognized
>>>
>>> is there a way to prevent files with a .rb extension or ruby shebang
>>> to be stripped?
>>
>> In theory the default 'strip' phase could be replaced by one that's more
>> selective, but please don't do that.
>>
>> The problem happens in almost every package, so the improvements should
>> be made in the default 'strip' phase.  The relevant procedure is 'strip'
>> in guix/build/gnu-build-system.scm, but beware that changing that file
>> (or just about anything else in that directory) will trigger a full
>> rebuild of all packages.  It would be nice to do at some point, but it's
>> quite far down on our TODO list.
>
> I think the ‘strip’ phase is fine this way: sure, it ends up invoking
> ‘strip’ on files that are not ELF files, but it’s harmless.  So we get
> these extra warnings in the build log, but they are really harmless.

Large numbers of spurious warnings are not harmless, because they make
it unlikely that anyone will notice the warnings worth our attention.
They condition us to ignore all warnings, because it's too much work to
look through them all.

> Conversely, attempts to be more selective may miss actual ELF files.

True, but this is more harmless than the spurious warnings, IMO.  It
merely means that we failed to save some disk space.

IMO, the best solution is to check for the presence of ELF headers
ourselves.  We already have ELF code in Guile master.

What do you think?

      Mark