[pacman-dev] Issues with strip on package sources

[Dave Reisner]

On Fri, Apr 08, 2011 at 10:10:19PM +1000, Allan McRae wrote:
> On 08/04/11 21:57, Mathew de Detrich wrote:
> >A problem that seems to be occurring on packages (typically on AUR) where
> >makepkg using gnu's strip causes the package building process to fail (since
> >/usr/bin/strip terminates with a different error message) when there is an
> >incompatible object file in the source. As an example with this current
> >package (read the latest comments)
> >https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=31566
> >
> >It fails to build unless you add
> >options=(!strip)
> >into the PKGBUILD, which of course solves the problem in a bastardized way
> >since it doesn't strip anything at all (and causes ridiculously bloated
> >packages)
> >
> >In this case the problem seems to be that the source package contains an
> >object file from a different architecture (x64) which when stripped, causes
> >the strip to prematurely terminate (and thus the building of the package to
> >fail)
> >
> >I looked through the man page for strip and there doesn't seem to be an
> >option for it to continue stripping even if it hits an incompatible source
> >file. The other option I guess would be to add more granularity (or another
> >option) where you can provide a mask for objects not to be stripped (so you
> >can do something like *64.so and any file matching that mask wont be
> >stripped). Or you could manually invoke strip on every object file, and not
> >terminate the makepkg process should it hit an "incompatible" object file
> >
> >In any case its an annoyance
> >
> 
> I can not be sure given no-one who hits this issue ever posts any
> actual output...   but you are probably hitting this binutils issue:
> http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=12632
> 
> 
> But anyway, it appears the change from using a whitelist to choose
> what files to strip to attempting to strip everything has caused
> some packaging issues.  So I also think some way to blacklist
> files/folders from being stripped would be useful.
> 
> Allan
> 

I think this is just a matter of strip encountering files that aren't of
the architecture of the current system. qemu is a good example of where
this fails:

/usr/bin/strip: Unable to recognise the format of the input file
`./usr/share/qemu/openbios-sparc32'

and file reports this as...

pkg/usr/share/qemu/openbios-sparc32: ELF 32-bit MSB executable, SPARC,
version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, stripped

These are files that are shipped precompiled and prestripped.

dave