Non-standard Archives Libraries

Non-standard archive formats may result in files being re-archived at each nmake execution. We have seen one cross compiler tool set, CCsparc and arsparc from CenterLine with this problem. The archive libraries created by arsparc were using the standard magic number causing nmake to think they were standard format, but nmake was actually unable to completely parse their contents. The result was that .o files with names greater than 16 characters were not recognized in the archive causing nmake to add them again to the archive. Normally if nmake does not recognize the format of an archive it will run the appropriate command to get the archive's table of contents. But the case when the magic number indicates a standard archive but the contents is slightly non-standard will cause problems.