Hi Peter, * Peter Rosin wrote on Sun, Aug 01, 2010 at 06:54:57PM CEST: > Now we need a something similar for the MS archiver (lib.exe)
Right. > As it happens, binutils ar does not work as well as lib, MSVC > sometimes has problems with the archives produced by ar. I > know that I have stated otherwise recently, but I was wrong. > The "odd" cases drowned in other failures since I was testing > without most of the MSVC patches applied to libtool and I > expected it to be a all or nothing deal. My bad. No worries; please make a note to eventually report to the binutils people though. > FWIW, I get decent results with the below archive script and > configuring with AR="/path/to/archive lib" > > The script still needs @<file>-support, in order to make it > possible for libtool to avoid falling back to "-r -o" > piecewise linking when the command line gets long, so that's > a TODO, and the options handling could be better in order to > better support more than just the very minimal ar features. > It also needs the file conversion stuff from the compile > script in order to support absolute file names. So, far from > perfect... > > Would it be possible to include this new auxiliary script and > a macro similar to the one that triggers the use of the compile > script? Yes, in principle: when them bugs are fixed. Would you be willing to rewrite the script so it - has the blurb header similar to 'compile', - half-way decent option handling (doesn't barf on "shift" if given too few options, diagnoses unknown options, treats contents of ARFLAGS as options not members, etc.) - prints error messages on stderr and exits nonzero then, I wonder whether we can and should call it 'archive', or whether that would clash with user file names in case they don't use AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR. OTOH, a script named 'ar' may not be installable anywhere due to the ar binary already there. Thoughts? Wrt. introducing a macro to set $AR, let's call it AM_PROG_AR, yes, that's easy to add as well, but will require developer adjustment of her configure.ac to have, and we need to coordinate with Libtool. Or we could call it straight from AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE, hmm. For now a viable workaround is to just make AR=/path/to/archive or, if Libtool is in the game, configure AR=... > AR=$1 > shift > action=$1 > shift > archive=$1 > shift > members=$@ This doesn't work in general. Just keep using "$@" below in place of $members (after extracting other flags). > case $action in > cru) > $AR -NOLOGO -OUT:"$archive" $members Some users may have hand-written ar calls with other flags, e.g., 'ar r', or other combinations. Any chance we can help them, too? For actual applicability, it is sufficient if you provide a working script, post testsuite results with it in place (you might want to MAKE='make AR=...' in order to force-test it), NEWS and doc blurb, but no need for changes to automake.in in the first iteration. Thanks! Ralf
