ranlib and ``ucb''

[gwyn at brl-smoke.UUCP]

In article <4976 at sun.uucp> guy at sun.uucp (Guy Harris) writes:
>...  (It's not perfect; if you copy an archive file, you have to do
>"ar ts <archive> >/dev/null" to reconstruct the table of symbols.  ...

I know that Guy is seldom mistaken, but I don't understand this at all.
I believe that the UNIX System V linker "ld" pays no attention to the
mod-time of the library, so it doesn't have the problem that 4BSD has
with copied archive files.  (I base this on experience with the DMD
"m32*" software, which is the only thing I use that is based on COFF.)