After confirming that libgcov.a library has not been built with debug symbols, I have installed debuginfo packages
You don't appear to understand how debuginfo packages work. They can't magically add debuginfo to an archive library that was built without debug symbols (or one that was stripped).
The usual build flow is:
- build everything with
-g
- prepare separate debuginfo packages for all fully-linked binaries (executables and shared libraries)
- strip fully-linked binaries (but not archive libraries)
This allows binaries and shared libraries to be small, but still debuggable after installing the debuginfo package.
Apparently, on SLES10 the "but not archive libraries" was not honored, and libgcov.a
got stripped as well. Since separate debuginfo packages do not work for archive libraries, you can't get that info back. Your only option is to rebuild GCC from sources.
P.S. Why would they strip libgcov.a
?
It's a trade-off: binaries that end-users link will be smaller, but code in libgcov.a
will not be debuggable.
Since most end-users never debug libgcov.a
, I'd say it was not an unreasonable trade-off.