Sorry to reply to myself, but I got it working by adding a call to 'ranlib
$lib' after every call to ar.
Hope this helps anyone with similar problems.

--underspecified

On 11/3/07, underspecified <underspecified@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Greetings,
>
> Could you tell me how exactly you called ranlib to fix this problem?
> I'm getting the same errors when compiling Acme SAC under leopard.
>
>
> --underspecified
>
> On 11/1/07, David Leimbach <leimy2k@gmail.com > wrote:
> >
> > On Oct 31, 2007 12:05 PM, andrey mirtchovski <mirtchovski@gmail.com >
> > wrote:
> > > the problem comes from libmp: the machine-dependent files written in
> > > assembly (/src/libmp/386/*-Darwin.s) are causing it (and they are all
> > > broken, not just the one reported). it's beyond me to figure out why
> > > at the moment. i tried a couple of things at random, but that's not a
> > > way to fix a problem.
> > >
> > > all the functions defined therein have a replacement written in C in
> > > the port/ directory of libmp. a workaround for now will be to fix the
> > > mkfile in port/ to not look for the machine-dependent files (comment
> > > out the test in the reduce script and let it just echo all file
> > > names).
> > >
> > > next bug is all the way to venti:
> > >
> > > 9l -o o.buildindex buildindex.o libvs.a/Users/andrey/plan9/lib/libventi.a
> > > ld: in libvs.a, archive has no table of contents
> > > collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
> > >
> > ranlib to the rescue... Got it run it explicitly on Darwin.  I think
> > gcc lets you get away without it on linux.
> >
> > Dave
> >
>
>
>