devtool deploy-target does install unstripped files on target This in contrast to the stripped files installed from packages in the rootfs and resulting image. This results in unexpected growth in storage space demand when using devtool compared to generating and booting from a new filsystem-image. It would be expected that the files are stripped just like the normal packages installed. (Reported and verified on Krogoth)
This is pretty much intentional. devtool is a development tool - it's expected that you'd want to be able to debug your code on the target, which means you need the debugging symbols. Another thing to consider is we're deliberately bypassing the packaging step by taking the files from the output of do_install, so that you don't have to have that fully working when you use devtool deploy-target (and thus you can get to testing your code on the target faster) - but that is in advance of the normal stripping that happens during packaging time.
Thanks for the explanation Paul, At our organization, we debug the target using the normal unstripped libs and executables via gdbserver and have the full set of debug symbol files available only on host, thus eliminating the need for larger, unstripped target files. I'll see if we can provide a patch where stripping can be an option to the deploy-target command. Would that be something of interest/trade-off?
Certainly, yes, and your use case does make sense. In addition to a command line option, we could even have a config option (read from conf/devtool.conf) in order to turn on stripping during deploy by default so you don't have to remember to use the option every time.
Tobias, I'm reassigning this to you since you're implementing this (the v1 on the list looks good so far apart from RP's review comments). Thanks.
Merged to master on 20:th of June