There is a bug/misfeature in cctools' ar, where it ends up with a cropped mtime on the output .a file. This confuses make, which then thinks the .a file is older than it really is, resulting in things being remade needlessly. ar from binutils doesn't have this issue. An example: 1. I update source.c, it gets mtime 1.234. 2. I run 'make' 3. make runs gcc to produce source.o and it gets mtime 2.234. 4. make runs ar to produce lib.a and it gets mtime 2.000. Next time I run 'make', it will rebuild lib.a since 2.000 is earlier than 2.234. Compare this with binutils, where lib.a would get an mtime like 2.678.
