Why do I get “ld: in libUnitTest++.a, archive has no table of contents” when building UnitTest++ on Mac OS X?

Question

After I download UnitTest++ version 1.4 (from http://sourceforge.net/projects/unittest-cpp/) and do a make, I get:

$ make
src/AssertException.cpp
src/Test.cpp
src/Checks.cpp
src/TestRunner.cpp
src/TestResults.cpp
src/TestReporter.cpp
src/TestReporterStdout.cpp
src/ReportAssert.cpp
src/TestList.cpp
src/TimeConstraint.cpp
src/TestDetails.cpp
src/MemoryOutStream.cpp
src/DeferredTestReporter.cpp
src/DeferredTestResult.cpp
src/XmlTestReporter.cpp
src/CurrentTest.cpp
src/Posix/SignalTranslator.cpp
src/Posix/TimeHelpers.cpp
Creating libUnitTest++.a library...
src/tests/Main.cpp
src/tests/TestAssertHandler.cpp
src/tests/TestChecks.cpp
src/tests/TestUnitTest++.cpp
src/tests/TestTest.cpp
src/tests/TestTestResults.cpp
src/tests/TestTestRunner.cpp
src/tests/TestCheckMacros.cpp
src/tests/TestTestList.cpp
src/tests/TestTestMacros.cpp
src/tests/TestTimeConstraint.cpp
src/tests/TestTimeConstraintMacro.cpp
src/tests/TestMemoryOutStream.cpp
src/tests/TestDeferredTestReporter.cpp
src/tests/TestXmlTestReporter.cpp
src/tests/TestCurrentTest.cpp
Linking TestUnitTest++...
ld: in libUnitTest++.a, archive has no table of contents
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [TestUnitTest++] Error 1

A co-worker doesn't get this error on his Mac, with the same version of gcc (4.2.1). (Note: I can use the libUnitTest++.a built by my co-worker, so I'm not blocked, but I would like to troubleshoot this problem nonetheless.)

I did a Google search, and it sounds like ranlib has solved others' similar problems, but libUnitTest++.a isn't getting created so I can't run ranlib on it.

Answer 1

I've run into this problem myself, you need to run ranlib on the .a file before passing it along to g++. I've patched this in a homebrew recipe, enjoy:

https://github.com/pdex/homebrew/blob/master/Library/Formula/unittest-cpp.rb