The syntax of llvm-ar's command line arguments is strange
to someone who is used to using plain old ar or GNU ar.

For instance, you don't get to specify which action it
will take; it always creates ('c') archives. See the ar(1)
man page for an example of what I am getting at.

It would be really nice if llvm-ar took either the same
kinds of command line options as other versions of ar,
or a subset thereof.

Sorry this is so vague; I don't have
time to explicitly specify all the things that real ar(1)
can do, and the documentation is widely available.

You're certainly right, llvm-ar should be a drop in replacement for the system
ar, which happens to do nice things for LLVM bytecode files (generates a symbol
table).

At this point, llvm-ar is not finished and should not be used, so this is not a
high-priority problem.

Created an attachment (id=19) [details]
Partial patch

Here is a patch which makes llvm-ar accept many common ar options, though
the only variable which actually does anything is still SymbolTableOption.

I have labeled it as a "partial patch" for the following other reason: ar(1) as
described in the Single Unix Specification and in the GNU manual has a syntax
for command-line arguments which is, as far as I can tell, unique. It
superficially resembles the command-line syntax of dump(8)/restore(8) and
tar(1), but it is different in that the argument to the [abi] options must
always precede the name of the archive. So although I appreciate the tasty
goodness of Chris's CommandLine library, and I briefly considered extending it
to support ar(1) argument syntax, I think the right thing to do is *not* to use
cl::ParseCommandLineOptions() in this tool, and instead to write a custom
command-line argument parser.

I'm probably not going to work on this at all for at least another week. Anyone
else have any comments?

llvm-ar should now have the proper syntax. Note: llvm-ar is not complete.