#8 universal build fails: libhighlight.a is a fat file, Inappropriate file type or format

[Ryan Carsten Schmidt]

Hello, we have a port for highlight in MacPorts, and I'm trying to give it the ability to build universal (i.e. for more than one architecture at a time, e.g. i386 and x86_64 together). This fails with the following message:

ar -crs libhighlight.a stylecolour.o stringtools.o xhtmlgenerator.o latexgenerator.o texgenerator.o rtfgenerator.o htmlgenerator.o ansigenerator.o svggenerator.o codegenerator.o xterm256generator.o bbcodegenerator.o odtgenerator.o syntaxreader.o elementstyle.o themereader.o datadir.o preformatter.o platform_fs.o ASStreamIterator.o ASResource.o ASFormatter.o ASBeautifier.o ASEnhancer.o InternalUtils.o  LuaExceptions.o  LuaFunction.o  LuaState.o LuaUserData.o  LuaUtils.o  LuaValue.o  LuaVariable.o  LuaWrappers.o
ar: libhighlight.a is a fat file (use libtool(1) or lipo(1) and ar(1) on it)
ar: libhighlight.a: Inappropriate file type or format
make[1]: *** [lib-static] Error 1

I'm uncertain how to fix this.

[André Simon]

Possibly the libhighlight.a file existed before you ran make? See
http://breakfastquay.com/forum/index.php?p=/discussion/18/compiling-fat-binaries-on-osx/p1

[Ryan Carsten Schmidt]

No; as you can see from the attached log file, it was a clean build.

[André Simon]

Would it be possible for me to dig into this using PureDarwin? I have no Mac available.