The bottomline is that once a change is needed then you must maintain your own documentatiion. At home my memory for this is perfect. Hans PS For thoise who seriously believe that last statement please contact me for a really good offer on a piece of the Eiffeltower. One previous owner, well cared for.... -----Original Message----- From: "Steve Davidson" <jeep at scshome.net> Sender: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2012 09:23:55 To: <hecnet at Update.UU.SE> Reply-To: hecnet at Update.UU.SESubject: RE: [HECnet] building simh On the other hand... Adding a soft link (and documenting it - don't ALL system managers document their system changes???) may be preferred to changing the makefile because once you change the makefile you OWN its maintenance. Different strokes for different folks. -Steve -----Original Message----- From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On Behalf Of Brian Hechinger Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2012 09:17 To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE Subject: Re: [HECnet] building simh Ignore him. Adding cruft to your filesystem when you could simply fix the makefile is a silly suggestion. Hi Sridhar!! :-P -brian On 4/11/2012 9:13 AM, hvlems at zonnet.nl wrote: 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