[R-SIG-Mac] Debugging Symbols

[Hannes Mühleisen]

Hello List,

we would like to bring up the topic of debug symbols in the CRAN OSX
binaries again. I realize this has been discussed before [1] and
realize the symbols are there for a reason, but in the duckdb package
their inclusion is particularly problematic.

Currently, the CRAN binary for OSX Arm64 weighs in at a whopping 97 MB
[2]. Inside it lives a 311 MB (uncompressed) folder with the debugging
symbols. When I remove the debugging symbols and re-create the
compressed tarball, its compressed size goes down to 11 MB, a pretty
drastic difference.

We are getting feedback from users that the package is too large for
them to be useful, so we would really like to improve this situation.

Would it perhaps be possible to exclude the duckdb from the inclusion
of the debug symbols? Is there anything we as package authors can do
here? There also may be other packages where this is relevant, e.g.
arrow would go down from 82 MB to 12 MB.

Best and thanks

Hannes

[1] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-mac/2022-June/014500.html
[2] curl -I https://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/big-sur-arm64/contrib/4.3/duckdb_0.10.1.tgz