Subject: bug#9941: Handle truncated member names in LIBADD archive libraries

From: "Daniel Richard G." <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Nov 2011 14:31:32 -0400

On Thu, 2011 Nov  3 12:51-0500, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
>
> The next question is if this broken 'ar' can be replaced with one
> that works.  Fixing the broken 'ar' might also require replacing
> the linker.

Building binutils didn't get very far on this system, alas.

> While this system is historically significant it is not significant in
> terms of current usage.  It does not make sense for libtool to provide
> a workaround unless that workaround is assured to work.

Here, I'm interested in NeXTSTEP only to the extent that it is
representative of older systems in general---there aren't many of them
that are easy to run without similarly ancient hardware!

Also, the GNU ar(1) man page not only mentions that the 15-character
name limit is a quirk of the a.out format, and the 16-character limit a
quirk of COFF, it suggests that in some combinations of system +
configuration, GNU ar(1) itself may impose these limits to maintain
compatibility with other tools.

The existing logic around "copying selected object files to avoid
basename conflicts" seems apropos; I'll dig into that a bit...

--Daniel

-- 
Daniel Richard G. || [email-masked]
My ASCII-art .sig got a bad case of Times New Roman.