Re: strip makes libs unusable

[Allin Cottrell <cottrell at ricardo dot ecn dot wfu dot edu>]

On Thu, 23 Sep 1999, David Ronis wrote:

> I more or less had sucessfully installed glibc-2.1.2 on my i586,
> linux-2.2.12, gcc-2.95.1 box (some backwards incompatibilities still
> remain to be solved,  as per my preceding post).
> 
> I ran strip/ranlib on all the .a libs (actually by mistake) and that
> made some programs (but not all)  unlinkable,
> specifically,  ones with calls to stat or lstat.   I reinstalled
> libc_nonshared.a and the problem went away.
> 
> 1.  Why?
> 2.   Do all the other .a libs have to be reinstalled.
> 3.   I thought strip was supposed to be safe on .a or .so libs--I guess
> it isn't.

I can't claim great expertise on this, but it seems that (a)
it's OK to strip shared libs (.so) if you want, but (b) if you
strip all symbols from static libs (.a) they're then useless --
though you can take off the debugging symbols (strip -g) if you
wish.  If this is correct, it's quite general, not specific to
glibc.

Allin Cottrell.