(Original message here: http://reactos.com:8080/archives/public/ros-dev/2005-January/001457.html too long to quote)
It seems most people liked the idea of getting rid of the .sym files and incorporate the symbolic information into the PE files. So, that's what happens now.
rsym will now take a file.nostrip.ext, create the ReactOS symbolic info, strip unneeded sections (.stab and .stabstr), strip COFF symbols, fixup the relocation entries, add the ReactOS symbolic info as a .rossym section and write the output to file.ext. The .sym files are gone. Since this gets rid of the second link sequence we did before to obtain file.ext, the build is even a little bit faster now.
It's a bigger change than I expected when I started on it. I've done a lot of testing in the last few days, but it is entirely possible that I missed something. If so, let me know and I'll try to fix it asap.
You can delete any files in \reactos\symbols (and remove that directory). A "make clean" is in order after "svn up".
Gé van Geldorp.