Hi,
--- Sam Varshavchik <mrsam(a)courier-mta.com> wrote:
Globe Trotter writes:
> dear list,
>
> i was looking into the qhull-devel package on extras, and I get a file
> which is in /usr/lib/libqhull.la. I have never seen a .la file before and
> so was wondering what this is, and how i should link to the library when
> calling. Any help?
.la are "stubs" generated by libtool, which is a shared library building
tool. If you look at them, they're actually short text files that can be
interpreted as either a short shell script fragment, or programmatically
parsed. Explaining what they are used for would be rather long and
complicated. But, the basic rules are:
1) If you are a developer, and you know all about libtool, then you know
what they're for, end of story.
2) If you are a developer, and you don't know anything about libtool, and
you want to link against this library: well, first of all you should educate
yourself about libtoo, it's good for you, but in the meantime just pretend
that it does not exist, and link against the corresponding .so file.
Thanks very much! I guess I am not confident enough to call myself a developer,
I am just writing a C program and I would like to use the library. So, there
are also two .so files?
/usr/lib/libqhull.so.5
/usr/lib/libqhull.so.5.0.0
I was wondering: how do I link a .so file? I know how to handle .a files (for
instance, I can call libm.a using -lm and -L for the library path). But I don't
know what to do with a .so file. I also don't know how to find the difference
between the two .so files above.
Any suggestions?
Many thanks and best wishes,
Trotter
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