libstdc-v3: portability of 'ar' w/o file list?

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Dec  5, 2000, Robert Lipe <robertlipe@usa.net> wrote:

> The 'ar' command fails on all three of these System V's.  Since we've
> told it that we're "a"dding files to the archive, it demands that we
> actually give it a file to add.  (GNU ar in the binutils that I examined
> has no such restriction and is one possible way around this.)  I could
> presumably come up with some empty file to archive it or some shell
> wrapper to just create the "!<arch>" header, but that all seems pretty
> gross.

I'm afraid that's the only option.  I'd thought about arranging for
libtool to handle this case and create an empty archive, but (i)
there's no portable way to create empty archives and (ii) some linkers
print odd error messages or just crash when given such an empty
archive.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer                  aoliva@{cygnus.com, redhat.com}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp        oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
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