Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!rutgers!psuvax1!schwartz@shire.cs.psu.edu From: schwartz@shire.cs.psu.edu (Scott Schwartz) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: object archives (Re: IEEE 1003.2) Summary: why indeed? Message-ID: <4158@psuvax1.cs.psu.edu> Date: 12 Dec 88 02:39:56 GMT References: <9137@smoke.BRL.MIL> <33251@think.UUCP> <14946@mimsy.UUCP> Sender: news@psuvax1.cs.psu.edu Reply-To: schwartz@shire.cs.psu.edu (Scott Schwartz) Organization: Pennsylvania State University, Computer Science Lines: 22 In-reply-to: chris@mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek) In article <14946@mimsy.UUCP>, chris@mimsy (Chris Torek) writes: >For that matter, why do we need object archives in the first place? >They are just a hack to save space (and perhaps, but not necessarily, >time). How about /lib/libc/*.o? Absolutely. Lots of other systems (VM/CMS, for example) have this; people like it, why not try it out under unix. 4.4BSD, anyone? About saving space: isn't it the case that object archives do save space? Less internal fragmentation, and all that? Maybe that is only true under the old filesystem. >(About 1/2 :-) ---the file system is *supposed* to be clean enough and >fast enough to support this sort of thing; why *are* we working against >it?) Hmmm, you might have to stat lots of files looking for the right entry point. I guess we would need a directory oriented version of something like ranlib, in that case. -- Scott Schwartz