How to strip debug symbols from the built binaries to separate files?

[Konstantin Erman]

We need to extract debug symbols from the C++ build produced binaries (shared libraries and executables) and store them to the separate files. On Linux it would be something like

# Copy the debug symbols from the .so file to a .debug file

objcopy --only-keep-debug libfoo.so libfoo.debug

# Remove the debug symbols from the .so

objcopy --strip-debug libfoo.so

# Add the gdb header to associate the .debug file with the .so

objcopy --add-gnu-debuglink=libfoo.debug libfoo.so

On Windows we get PDBs generated just fine, now we need the same for Mac and Linux.

This operation is so typical that I was hoping to find it as a standard part of C++ toolchain but to my surprise Bazel options --strip and --stripopt seems to only control removal of the symbols from binaries, but not the extraction of symbols to separate symbol files.

I probably can write a custom rule for that but I still hope there is built-in or at least commonly accepted solution already.

Thank you!

Konstantin