[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Kai Henningsen) writes: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Andrew Pinski) wrote on 31.08.05 in <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > > If you consider Darwin "modern", then that statement is not correct > > as moving/copying an archive on darwin, requires ranlib to be run. > > Is there a point to this behaviour? It sounds as if someone confused an > archive with a nethack scorefile ...
a.out archives used to work this way too, e.g. on SunOS 4. The idea was that people would often use ar without updating the symbol table. Thus the symbol table has a timestamp. The linker checks that the timestamp of the symbol table is not older than the file modification time of the archive. In practice this turned out to be a mistake, as everybody always updated the symbol table with every use of ar, and it caused trouble when simply copying archives around. So the notion was abandoned in the move to COFF and ELF. >From my perspective Darwin lives in its own little world, and I guess they never abandoned the symbol table timestamp checking. Ian
