A quick and probably stupid question

[Dave Korn]

On 21/04/2010 23:51, Tom Williams wrote:
> So, I'm wanting to build binutils 2.20.1 on a Solaris  8 (SPARC) system
> but the system has a "partial" set of development tools installed.  gcc
> is installed but but "ar" isn't.  There is a non-GNU linker installed as
> well.
> 
> I've tried doing a build of the binutils source on this system and it
> failed complaining the "ar" can't be found.

  It's used to make a static archives of libiberty, libbfd and libopcodes
during the build, which are then used when linking the various binutils
applications.

> Am I out of luck in getting binutils built from source on this system,
> requiring me to find and download a pre-built package?

  The sunfreeware archive will have one.  Great site, in case you haven't run
into it before.  http://www.sunfreeware.com/

  (You could, in theory, provide some dummy app or shell script called 'ar'
that just exits with status zero, to trick configure into thinking it has a
working ar; then you'd run the make until it crashed out, and manually edit
the link line to replace any references to .a files with a list of all the .a
files it tried to add to the archive using the dummy 'ar'.... but it'd be an
awful lot easier to just download a prebuilt package and then use that to
build yourself an up-to-date binutils if necessary.)

    cheers,
      DaveK