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.
2) If you ar enot a developer, leave these files alone. Don't touch them, or screw around with them in any way. If you grab some other software that uses this library, and that uses libtool, then everything will work itself out on its own, without bothering you.
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