BSD archive file formats

2012-08-03 Thread pete
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

Re: BSD archive file formats

2012-08-03 Thread David Chisnall
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

Re: BSD archive file formats

2012-08-03 Thread 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