[HECnet] building simh

[Sridhar Ayengar]

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