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