To make the debugging information in static libraries more useful when used together with the source files from the -debuginfo package, we need to rewrite the static library to use paths under /usr/src/debug, just as we do while we strip the debugging information from shared objects and applications.
This is really part of rpm debugedit. But lets keep it attached to elfutils for now. Currently eu-strip doesn't handle ar archives at all. Although there is some code that appears to iterate through the archive and do the right thing (handle_ar), this code is never used because src/strip.c also contains: case ELF_K_AR: /* It is not possible to strip the content of an archive direct the output to a specific file. */ if (unlikely (output_fname != NULL || debug_fname != NULL)) { error (0, 0, gettext ("%s: cannot use -o or -f when stripping archive"), fname); result = 1; } else { /* We would like to support ar archives, but currently it just doesn't work at all since we call elf_clone on the members which doesn't really support ar members. result = handle_ar (fd, elf, NULL, fname, preserve_dates ? tv : NULL); */ error (0, 0, gettext ("%s: no support for stripping archive"), fname); result = 1; } break;