Makefiles for library maintenance

[Dan Packman]

The documentation for make (both ATT and UCB) says one can reference a
module in a library, that is a(b) means the element b in archive a.
One would hope that updates on this module would be calculated from the
date recorded in the archive a and not the date of the archive itself.
My tests of this seem to indicate that the archive date in incorrectly
used and not the element date.  I can, of course, extract all elements
in the archive with the appropriate date before invoking make and then
update the archive after exiting make via the following script:

#! /bin/csh
# Fool dumb makes to allow archive of object files
ar xo *.a
/bin/make $*
ar r *.a *.o
rm *.o

One could generalize to multiple local archives, but I'd rather find a
more elegant and faster solution within make (a newer version?).  For
large modules, the vast numbers of object files are getting in my way.
Do I have to redefine all suffixes?  Any help will be appreciated.

PS: This problem seems to exist in the vms make clone mms.
Dan Packman     NCAR                         INTERNET: pack at acdpyr.UCAR.EDU
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