dh_strip - strip executables, shared libraries, and some static libraries
dh_strip [debhelper options] [-Xitem] [--dbg-package=package] [--keep-debug]
dh_strip is a debhelper program that is responsible for stripping executables, shared libraries, and static libraries that are not used for debugging.
This program examines your package build directories and works out what to strip on its own. It uses file(1) and file permissions and filenames to figure out what files are shared libraries (*.so), executable binaries, and static (lib*.a) and debugging libraries (lib*_g.a, debug/*.so), and strips each as much as is possible. (Which is not at all for debugging libraries.) In general it seems to make very good guesses, and will do the right thing in almost all cases.
Since it is very hard to automatically guess if a file is a module, and hard to determine how to strip a module, dh_strip does not currently deal with stripping binary modules such as .o files.
Causes dh_strip to save debug symbols stripped from the packages it acts on as independent files in the package build directory of the specified debugging package.
For example, if your packages are libfoo and foo and you want to include a foo-dbg package with debugging symbols, use dh_strip --dbg-package=foo-dbg.
Note that this option behaves significantly different in debhelper compatibility levels 4 and below. Instead of specifying the name of a debug package to put symbols in, it specifies a package (or packages) which should have separated debug symbols, and the separated symbols are placed in packages with "-dbg" added to their name.
If the DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS environment variable contains "nostrip", nothing will be stripped, in accordance with Debian policy (section 10.1 "Binaries").
Debian policy, version 3.0.1
This program is a part of debhelper.
Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>