when was the last time a system needed a separate ranlib step? this feels like something someone with a vendetta's evaluated
@nabijaczleweli I don't know about other systems, but on Solaris, Sun originally shipped Solaris 2.0 without a ranlib command, and later added a shell script that only had "exit 0" to deal with complaints about breaking builds of libraries that still called it.
@alanc im wondering because POSIX specifies ar to say "the index is always generated" in a tone that makes clear the editor is annoyed at users asking
allthewhile ossp-eperl (1997) probes for ranlib in its autohell, and that documentation says "projects that build libraries want this :)"
so that, in light of, Solaris 2 (1992?) not having it, certainly makes little sense. too me
@alanc ah but indeed it's congruent — v1-v7/SysIII/SysV don't seem to have it, so naturally SunOS 5 doesn't, and per the CSRG CDs, it first appears in 4BSD as ranlib(1) ("convert archives to random libraries", hence the weird name), so naturally SunOS 4 did
@alanc (well, my source for sys3/sys5 is "a dump from my good friend vetus", but this seems to support your real+verifiable SunOS dump, so)