[Xastir] Xastir and Fedora Core 6

[Curt Mills]

On Sun, 26 Nov 2006, Jim Bradbury wrote:

> Thanks!  I had lesstif but not lesstif-devel.
> Since I had all the repo's installed, as root I did
> 
>     yum -y install lesstif-devel
> 
> and picked up what I needed.

For those that don't understand what all this "-devel" stuff is
about, it works like this:  There are libraries (They end in ".so"
or ".a") and there are C-language header files (ending in ".h").

Look in /usr/lib to see the .so's and .a', and in /usr/include to
see a bunch of .h files.  You can look at the .h files with "less"
or with an editor to see what they're all about, but the .so and .a
files are binary files so you can't really look at them that way.

The .so's are equivalent to DLL's, for those of you who are familiar
with the Windows world.

Now:  In order to RUN a binary, you need the libraries and versions
of same that the binary was compiled to use.

To COMPILE from sources to a binary, you need the libraries AND the
header files.  The header files inform the compiler about the API
(Applications Programming Interface) available in each of the
libraries.  Without the headers, the compiler doesn't know anything
about the libraries.

So... For a binary you only need the libraries installed, but to
COMPILE to a binary from sources you also need the header files,
which are typically not installed and are kept in separate "-devel"
packages most of the time.  To have a complete development system
you need those extra packages.

-- 
Curt, WE7U.				archer at eskimo dot com
http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
  Lotto:  A tax on people who are bad at math. - unknown
Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates. - WE7U.
The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"