Problems with ar(1) and modified objects

[Betsy Hanes Perry]

(please, br'er Fox, don't throw me into that bramble bush!)

I need help interpreting the documentation on Ar(1); we're trying
to use it, and it doesn't seem to perform as expected.
 
The problem is as follows: here at Dartmouth, we're building
a large(600K) C program.  It now takes approximately fifteen minutes
to reMake this program, even if only one routine has been changed.
 
At the moment, our Make includes the line:
cc $(OBJECTS)             to reload the object files.

It occurred to us that it was wasteful to rebuild the entire object 
file if we were modifying only one or two routines.  It seemed from
the documentation that ar might be able to modify ONLY the changed
objects, leaving the others intact.
So we changed our Make file to read: 
ar ruv tempint $(OBJECTS)
ranlib tempint
ld -o int tempint

Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to produce a usable binary.
Does anybody out there have any clues as to why?  (Please reply
by mail if possible..)
 
Thank you.
Betsy Hanes Perry
Lorien Pratt
(decvax,linus,cornell)!dartvax!dartlib!(rbetsy,rlorien)
-- 
Betsy Perry
UUCP: {decvax|linus|cornell}!dartvax!betsy
CSNET: betsy at dartmouth
ARPA:  betsy%dartmouth at csnet-relay