svn commit: r213643 - head/usr.bin/ar

[Benjamin Kaduk]

On Thu, 14 Oct 2010, Erik Cederstrand wrote:

>
> Den 13/10/2010 kl. 05.55 skrev Bruce Evans:
>
>
>> [Erik wrote, but the attribution was stripped]
>>> I'm a real beginner here. As I read the manuals (GNU ar and BSD ar), 
>>> the only flags that really control archive contents on archive 
>>> creation is 'q' and 'r'. The 'l' is ignored, 'c' and 'v' control 
>>> verbosity, and 'u' and 's' are for performance purposes that are 
>>> largely irrelevant today (extracting every single *.a file and 
>>> recreating it wit ar -rD takes less than 10 secs on my slow machine). 
>>> Is there any negative impact at runtime from having all archives 
>>> created with either -rD or -qD (ignoring verbosity at build time for 
>>> now)?
>>
>> I don't really know.  's' is also useful for non-libraries.  'u' is related
>> to clobbering times, but goes the wrong way by updating the archive if the
>> file is newer.  I think all FreeBSD libraries should be built with the same
>> flags (probably ARFLAGS, with you putting -D in it if you don't want the
>> timestamp update).  However, the places that already use ARFLAGS but set it
>> themselves may be a problem.  Some Makefiles initentionally avoid using
>> bsd.lib.mk because they are special and it does the wrong things for them.
>> They probably don't really care about the exact archive flags, but need to
>> be checked individually.
>
> I'd like to give it a try. This is where an easy-to-use regression suite 
> with reasonable coverage for FreeBSD would come in handy :-)

I am certainly willing to help test, and maybe even help check the uses of 
ARFLAGS (though I seem to have a severe shortage of time).
I still have my test environment where ar(1) bails without -D, which would 
probably be helpful.

-Ben