what is a .la file

Sam Varshavchik mrsam at courier-mta.com
Tue Apr 3 03:02:10 UTC 2007


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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