BSD archive file formats

[Warner Losh]

Hi Pete,

the best way to find out if support for archives are needed is to release it for testing.  People find the craziest things when testing in a wider arena.

Alternatively, see if can survive /usr/ports being thrown at it :)  even clang can't do that yet (although it isn't always clang's fault for reasons too numerous to enumerate here).

Warner

On Aug 3, 2012, at 6:39 AM, pete wrote:

> Hi David,
> 
> Thanks for your information! Then I'll probably work on other features
> development first. And I also checked that MCLinker is able to link itself
> with archive libraries on i386 FreeBSD9.
> 
> Thanks,
> Pete
> 
> On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 7:43 PM, David Chisnall
> <theraven at theravensnest.org>wrote:
> 
>> Hi Pete.
>> 
>> The end of the man page says:
>> 
>>>     This manual page documents the ar(1) archive formats used by the
>> 4.4BSD
>>>     and UNIX SVR4 operating system releases.
>> 
>> I think it's probably safe to assume that the 4.4BSD format was dropped at
>> some indeterminate point in the past, probably when we moved from a.out to
>> ELF format binaries.  If the tools currently shipped in the base system are
>> not producing them, then support is probably not important - people can
>> always install GNU binutils from ports if it is for some legacy software.
>> 
>> David
>> 
>> On 3 Aug 2012, at 12:36, pete wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi folks,
>>> 
>>> I'm working on archive file format support in MCLinker project.
>>> 
>>> GNU variant archive format is supported in MCLinker now. And from FreeBSD
>>> man pages, I can find there are some differences between BSD and GNU
>>> variants. However, when I try to check BSD variant on freebsd9 (i386), I
>>> can only find GNU variant archive files. And if using "ar" to make an
>>> archive file on freebsd9, I still get a GNU variant one.
>>> 
>>> So, I would like to ask if BSD variant supported/existing in BSD system.
>> Or
>>> I missed something in configuring or others?
>>> 
>>> I'm new to BSD. Any information will be helpful!
>>> 
>>> Thanks,
>>> Pete
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>> 
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