On Fri, 10 Dec 1999, ITOH Yasufumi wrote:

: If the ranlib function is not required, we can use Berkeley ar.
: The Berkeley ar is much faster, smaller, less buggy, and
: under less restricted license compared to the binutils' one.
: Why don't we use it?

The ELF toolchains on SYSV-derived systems (where ELF came from) have no
ranlib(1).  The ar(1) program implicitly does the function of ranlib(1)
automatically.

The correct thing to do is fix the ranlib handling (or see if a fix already
exists)--after all, binutils is used by much more than NetBSD on ELF.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling (tv@pobox.com)