cabal: library archive index and Mac OS X?

[David Brown]

On Sun, 20 Mar 2005 23:54:54 -0800, Isaac Jones <ijones at syntaxpolice.org>  
wrote:

>> The index stores a time stamp; if the .a file's modification date is
>> newer, then ld will refuse to load from it until you re-run
>> ranlib. This commonly happens when you first build your .a files and
>> then touch their modification date while installing.
>
> Owch.  That's some odd behavior; any links to an explanation for why
> it works that way?  Does this happen on other arches?

Any system where ranlib actually does something will probably work this  
way.  With most modern archive formats, ranlib doesn't do anything, but  
the traditional approach is that it updates the index in the library, and  
they do it based on timestamps.

Dave