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Re: archive of archives
- From: nick clifton <nickc at redhat dot com>
- To: NightStrike <nightstrike at gmail dot com>, Cary Coutant <ccoutant at google dot com>
- Cc: Binutils <binutils at sourceware dot org>
- Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2013 15:32:57 +0100
- Subject: Re: archive of archives
- References: <CAF1jjLtCm9Nuua4hytxsvgE1tSnypLUan=R1L6o0BCNjSd437g at mail dot gmail dot com> <CAHACq4qM+2ZziXdncX-VZibHmJ6NArR0fg9yAFy=jFQTN1Z8uw at mail dot gmail dot com> <CAF1jjLv3-9-tvQh0z-=FzjfGFVm4HywFT3DKm19qGA1ZUfWUXQ at mail dot gmail dot com> <CAF1jjLuqcgvWOuo6j_iX_CGjkSZBJJKDwS4prKVX=NH-3e=tQw at mail dot gmail dot com>
Hi NightStrike,
$ x86_64-w64-mingw32-ar cru liba.a libb.a
$ x86_64-w64-mingw32-ranlib liba.a
The resulting liba.a doesn't work too well:
$ x86_64-w64-mingw32-nm liba.a
x86_64-w64-mingw32-nm: liba.a: File format not recognized
No, it's not supposed to work.
We use an MRI linker script to combine 3 libX.a files into a single
libZ.a file. It seems to work.
This is because you can put any file you like into an archive, including
other archives. BUT - you cannot construct a symbol index for this sort
of nested archive[1] and it will not be recognised by other tools that
are expecting an archive consisting solely of object files.
For example:
% echo "first" > f1
% echo "second" > f2
% ar cr libfoo.a f1 f2
You can print and extract files from this non-object-file archive:
% ar t libfoo.a
f1
f2
% mv f1 f1.saved
% ar x libfoo.a f1
% cmp f1 f1.saved
But try to run a binary tool on it and:
% nm libfoo.a
nm: f1: File format not recognized
nm: f2: File format not recognized
Based on what you are saying, are we
doing something that will not be supported in the future?
I know of no plans to add support for this kind of feature. If you want
to merge multiple libraries into a single big library, either make the
new library a thin library or else extract and add the contents of each
input library one by one. This is free software however, so if you feel
the need, please do create a patch to handle nested archives and submit
it for review... :-)
Cheers
Nick
[1] Actually you can use the 's' option to ar or run ranlib, and it will
appear to work, but nothing will happen. No symbol table will be
constructed. This could be considered to be a bug.