IIRC the Release mode binaries are much smaller (tested that when I
had orocos_toolchain_ros checked out of svn instead of installed by
deb). Default setting seems to be Debug, so there's probably room for
improvement space-wise by switching. Or are there strong reasons for
having Debug as default right now?

The default is RelWithDebInfo, with the intention that it be changed to Release or RelWithAsserts when a package becomes stable enough. Even after stripping the shared objects they're still 25MB.

Josh