[clarkgoble]

I was porting over a makefile to the Mac and found some weird changes. The ar command appears to be missing the s option. This means you have to run ranlib separately. This isn't that big a deal, once you realize what's going on.

I'm curious of why they did this though. Anyone know?

[lindberg]

Must be an older version of ar.

Typically on MacOS X, the libtool -static command is used to create libraries, and it automatically updates the table of contents so ranlib is not needed. libtool also handles fat libraries better than ar; this was the main reason it was written at NeXT I think. Note that this is a completely different different program than GNU's libtool; NeXT's program predated GNU's and they've never changed the name. GNU's libtool is available as the glibtool command.

Since NeXT/Apple's development environment doesn't ever use the ar command, I doubt they've had much reason to update it.