[R-SIG-Mac] Debugging Symbols

[Jeroen Ooms]

On Thu, Apr 4, 2024 at 9:47 AM Hannes Mühleisen <hannes using duckdblabs.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

FWIW, the binaries on https://duckdb.r-universe.dev/duckdb are built
with _R_SHLIB_STRIP_: TRUE and those are indeed around 10M (both for
Linux and MacOS).

For similar reasons p3m (formerly rspm) also strips debugging symbols
these days, e.g:
https://p3m.dev/cran/latest/bin/macosx/big-sur-x86_64/contrib/4.3/duckdb_0.10.1.tgz
See also this comment:
https://github.com/rocker-org/rocker-versioned2/issues/340#issuecomment-1301157428

I agree it would be nice for a package to be able to opt-out
altogether, including on CRAN. I don't think that is possible right
now.