[HECnet] building simh

[hvlems at zonnet.nl]

Sridhar, you are a jolly fellow aren't you ?
Now I thought I understood the way linux uses libraries and yet you add another mystery   Is it because you want to keep me in a perpetual mystified state of mind?
Hans

:-) 
-----Original Message-----
From: Sridhar Ayengar <ploopster at gmail.com>
Sender: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2012 08:52:15 
To: <hecnet at Update.UU.SE>
Reply-To: hecnet at Update.UU.SECc: Dave McGuire<mcguire at neurotica.com>
Subject: Re: [HECnet] building simh

Dave McGuire wrote:
Is it possible to explain what the magic does?
More precisely: what is the difference between an .a and an .so library?

    I detailed this a few posts ago.   .a is a static library, .so is a
shared library.

How on earth does -lpcap point to /usr/lib?

    -lpcap tells the linker to look in every directory in the library
search path to find either libpcap.a or libpcap.so.

    This library lives in /usr/lib on most systems, but the simh makefile
hard-coding that path (and hard-coding it to only find the static
library) is a big mistake.

It is, but why not just symlink it for the time being?

Peace...   Sridhar