[R-pkg-devel] Portable method of stripping debug symbols

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Christopher,

On 3 January 2018 at 21:59, Christopher Lalansingh wrote:
| I'm running into troubles with the total size of my package and I've found that when using Rcpp, one can reduce the size of shared objects by stripping out debug symbols by including `-Wl,-S' in PKG_LIBS. Unfortunately this is not portable with Solaris, and using ifeq in my Makevars file to check for SunOS isn't portable either.
| 
| I came across an Issue on github (https://github.com/RcppCore/Rcpp/issues/522) which addresses possible ways to do this portably, but I can't find reference to // [[Rcpp::plugins(strip)]] in any other documentation. If anyone has run into this before and has any suggestions it would be much appreciated.

I have two writeups on this in my r^4 series:

http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2017/08/20#010_stripping_shared_libraries
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2017/08/14#009_compact_shared_libraries

The earlier one has this snippet you can add to src/Makevars, and you could
even do this conditionally (ie do it on Linux, don't do it on Solaris, or the
other way, or ...)

  strippedLib: $(SHLIB)
          if test -e "/usr/bin/strip"; then /usr/bin/strip --strip-debug $(SHLIB); fi

  .phony: strippedLib

This will strip if and only if there is a strip binary. May work for yuo.

Dirk

-- 
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