[PLUG] RPM/lib question

[Terry Griffin]

On Friday 18 March 2005 6:02 pm, Aaron Burt wrote:
> OK, weird one:  I'm building library RPMs from source tarballs, and
> in addition to .so files, I'm getting .a and .la files in /usr/lib. 
> What the heck are those, and should they go in the main binary
> package or in the -devel package?
>
> Anyone know?
>

The .a files should go in the -devel package. The .la files should go
in the library's main binary package.

The .a files are static libraries, used (optionally) only when building
applications.

The .la files are used by the libtool utility. They're basically an
abstraction layer on top of shared libraries intended to hide some
platform-specific dependencies.

Terry