what is a .la file

[Globe Trotter]

Hi,


--- Sam Varshavchik <mrsam at 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



 
____________________________________________________________________________________
8:00? 8:25? 8:40? Find a flick in no time 
with the Yahoo! Search movie showtime shortcut.
http://tools.search.yahoo.com/shortcuts/#news