Including -s in LDFLAGS makes it hard to save debug symbols of release gems

[apolcyn]

Currently, rake-compiler-dock sets -s in LDFLAGS when installing rubies for cross-compilation (done in

rake-compiler-dock/Dockerfile.mri.erb

Line 165 in 9e840c4

export LDFLAGS='-pipe <%= strip %>' && \

).

I want to say this logic was carried over from rake-compiler/rake-compiler#165.

Speaking for the grpc gem, when shipping release gems, this -s flag is normally OK because we want to strip symbols anyways.

But it's become apparent that we need to make debug symbols for our pre-compiled binaries available (otherwise, it can be hard to deal with bugs in the wild).

I came up with an approach in grpc/grpc#34632, the idea is:

1. build an unstripped native library

2. save debug symbols off to the side

3. strip the native library, and include this in a release gem

4. publish debug symbols from 2) in a separate auxiliary package

Problem:

Because we have -s in LDFLAGS, in order to do step 1) we need to manually find and remove -s from $LDFLAGS in our extconf.rb.

Finding and removing -s seems fragile long term. For example, if the flag was renamed to --strip-all, our logic would break.

I'm wondering if we can create more explicit way to prevent automatic stripping on the rake-compiler/rake-compiler-dock side.

[flavorjones]

@apolcyn Thanks for starting this conversation. I'll explore some options and write them up here for feedback from you and other users.