[Call for testers] "BSD ar"

[Kai Wang]

On Fri, Jan 11, 2008 at 11:40:36AM -0800, Steve Kargl wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 11, 2008 at 03:23:36PM +0100, Kai Wang wrote:
> > 
> > I think it's time for "BSD ar" to get a public review after months of
> > bug hunting and cleaning up done by jkoshy@ and me.  The majority of
> > the coding work was done during the summer of 2007 and was sponsored
> > by Google SoC 2007 programme.
> > 
> > You can find the tarball at:
> > http://web.student.chalmers.se/~kaiw/patch/ar-20080111.tgz
> > 
> 
> Do I drop the ar/ directory into src/usr.bin as a replacement
> for the current ar/?

Then make buildworld?
This will possibly not work because you may need to turn off
the build of GNU ar first, which is not simple because the build of other
GNU tools may depend on the build of GNU ar. (I'm working on this)

The recommended way is: (for now)

1. Backup your GNU ar first:
  % cp /usr/bin/ar SOME_BACKUP_DIR

2. Build BSD ar
  extract the tarball
  % cd ar
  % make

3. Replace
  # cp ./ar /usr/bin/ar
  # cd /usr/bin
  # ln -f ar ranlib

Then you can do something like ports build or "make buildworld"
to try it out.

Later when you need to recover GNU ar:

  # cp SOME_BACKUP_DIR/ar /usr/bin/ar
  # cd /usr/bin
  # ln -f ar ranlib


BTW: Please use the version I packed up today, which fixed two bugs
reported by swell.k[AT]gmail[Dot]com yesterday.

http://web.student.chalmers.se/~kaiw/patch/ar-20080112.tgz

--
Kai