ranlib and ``ucb''

[levy at ttrdc.UUCP]

In article <4976 at sun.uucp>, guy at sun.uucp (Guy Harris) writes:
[about System V ar]
>> It seems to me that this is the correct external behaviour: the library
>> builder should manage its table of contents itself.
>
>Yes, it's less error-prone, which is presumably why most other OSes do it
>this way.  (It's not perfect; if you copy an archive file, you have to do
>"ar ts <archive> >/dev/null" to reconstruct the table of symbols.  You
>could, of course, write a script to do
>
>	for i in "$@"
>	do
>		ar ts $i >/dev/null
>	done
>
>and call it "ranlib"....  The 4.3BSD "ranlib" has a "touch" option
>which merely updates the time on the table-of-symbols member, rather than
>rebuilding it, which is useful for the case described above.)
>-- 
>	Guy Harris
>	{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
>	guy at sun.com (or guy at sun.arpa)

Ummmm... I beg your royal pardon?  Under the System V systems HERE, I am
unaware of ever having any reason to update the table of symbols by 'ar ts'
or any other method on a copy of an archive ('.a') file for the sake of ld
or make or anything else.

Please clarify?
-- 
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