ar(1) format_decimal failure is fatal?

[perryh at pluto.rain.com]

Tim Kientzle <kientzle at freebsd.org> wrote:

> Personally, I wonder if it wouldn't make sense to just always
> force the timestamp, uid, and gid to zero ..

uid and gid, OK.  Timestamp, no.  It is not that rare to need
to find out which version of some .o is in a particular .a file,
usually in connection with debugging some obscure failure.

For that matter, aren't there some versions of make(1) that can
check whether an archive member is up to date by examining the
timestamp in the archive?