Received: (qmail 16317 invoked from network); 25 Oct 1998 05:54:31 -0000
Message-Id: <9810250554.AA36998@marc.watson.ibm.com>
Date: Sun, 25 Oct 1998 01:54:21 -0400
From: David Edelsohn <dje@watson.ibm.com>
To: apbugs@apache.org
Cc: Fulvio Mlafatto <fmal@fmal.com>
Subject: Re: libstandard.a is not a COFF file during make (PR# 2330)

>Number:         3287
>Category:       os-aix
>Synopsis:       Re: libstandard.a is not a COFF file during make (PR# 2330)
>Confidential:   yes
>Severity:       serious
>Priority:       medium
>Responsible:    apache
>State:          closed
>Class:          sw-bug
>Submitter-Id:   unknown
>Arrival-Date:   Sun Oct 25 00:00:01 PDT 1998
>Last-Modified:  Sun Oct 25 09:26:11 PST 1998
>Originator:     
>Organization:
>Release:        
>Environment:
>Description:
>How-To-Repeat:
>Fix:
>Audit-Trail:
State-Changed-From-To: open-closed
State-Changed-By: marc
State-Changed-When: Sun Oct 25 09:26:11 PST 1998
State-Changed-Why:
Text added to original PR.
Responsible-Changed-From-To: gnats-admin-apache
Responsible-Changed-By: marc
Responsible-Changed-When: Sun Oct 25 09:26:11 PST 1998
Responsible-Changed-Why:
Moving misfiled PR into main database.
Category-Changed-From-To: pending-os-aix
Category-Changed-By: marc
Category-Changed-When: Sun Oct 25 09:26:11 PST 1998

>Unformatted:
	These errors of "not a COFF file" or "not an export library"
reported by both GCC and EGCS are due to a bug in an AIX 4.3.0 and AIX
4.3.1 support library libld.a.  GCC's linker front-end, collect2, uses the
AIX-provided "ldfcns" to parse object modules and library archives.  The
version of this library shipped with AIX 4.3.0 and AIX 4.3.1 does not
correctly support the AIX 4.3 "Big" archive format files.  The support
function gets confused and returns erroneous information about the
library being examined. 

	This bug apparently is fixed in PTFs available for AIX 4.3.1 as
well as in AIX 4.3.2.  Alternatively, one can workaround the problem by
building new libraries only containing 32-bit objects using "ar -g" which
forces the old library archive format.  One can extract the 32-bit members
of an existing "Big" archive and re-archive them in the old format.  These
workarounds only should be used as a temporary measure, not as a permamnt
manner in which to build AIX 4.3 archives as this will cause problems when
utilizing 64-bit systems.

David