Disclaimer: code changes and below description are generated using Claude Code

Summary

This PR enhances the auditwheel repair command with granular symbol stripping options and debug symbol collection capabilities. The current --strip option only supports all-or-nothing symbol removal. This enhancement provides fine-grained control over which symbols to strip and adds the ability to extract and preserve debug symbols for debugging purposes.

New Features

Enhanced Strip Levels

• --strip-level option with four levels:
  • none (default): No stripping
  • debug: Remove debug symbols only (strip -g)
  • unneeded: Remove unneeded symbols (strip --strip-unneeded)
  • all: Remove all symbols (strip -s) - equivalent to current --strip

Debug Symbol Collection

• --collect-debug-symbols: Extract debug symbols before stripping using objcopy --only-keep-debug
• --debug-symbols-output: Custom output path for debug symbols zip file
• Creates zip archive with preserved directory structure
• Automatically adds GNU debuglink to stripped binaries

Command Examples

# Current behavior (still supported with deprecation warning)
auditwheel repair --strip wheel.whl

# New enhanced options
auditwheel repair --strip-level=debug wheel.whl
auditwheel repair --strip-level=debug --collect-debug-symbols wheel.whl
auditwheel repair --strip-level=debug --collect-debug-symbols --debug-symbols-output=debug.zip wheel.whl

Expected Output

Standard repair:
- mywheel-1.0-py3-none-linux_x86_64.whl

With debug symbol collection:
- mywheel-1.0-py3-none-linux_x86_64.whl (stripped wheel)
- mywheel-1.0-py3-none-linux_x86_64_debug_symbols.zip (debug symbols)