[mercury-users] stripping is great! (was: MSVC port for Mercury?)

[Fergus Henderson]

On 20-Feb-1999, Koen De Turck <eric.de.turck at skynet.be> wrote:
> I was so excited of all that stripping,
> so i stripped mercury_compile.exe (originally 14 MB, now only
> 2,9 MB). This wasn't too dangerous i hope ?

No, that shouldn't cause any problems.

In fact you can probably strip the library files too,
using `strip --strip-unneeded *.a'.

> Is there a way to strip compiled files automatically ? 
> Maybe you could fix this in the next distribution.

You could try the following patch (which you should be
able to apply to either ml.in in the source code or
to the installed copy of ml in the `bin' directory).
However, I'm not sure if it will work, because
I don't know whether `gcc -s' is still broken in
Cygwin b20.1 or whether that has been fixed yet.

Index: ml.in
===================================================================
RCS file: /home/mercury1/repository/mercury/scripts/ml.in,v
retrieving revision 1.50
diff -u -u -r1.50 ml.in
--- ml.in	1998/10/16 06:19:26	1.50
+++ ml.in	1999/02/20 15:30:58
@@ -94,15 +94,7 @@
 BROWSER_LIB_NAME=mer_browser
 
 verbose=false
-case $FULLARCH in
-	*-win95|*-winnt|*-win32|*-cygwin32)
-		# `gcc -s' is broken in gnu-win32
-		strip=false
-		;;
-	*)
-		strip=true
-		;;
-esac
+strip=true
 mercury_libs=default
 all_libs=default
 demangle=true

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "Binaries may die
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |   but source code lives forever"
PGP: finger fjh at 128.250.37.3        |     -- leaked Microsoft memo.