On Thu, 2015-02-26 at 07:57 -0800, af300...@gmail.com wrote: > Hi, > > I'm a complete neophyte to the whole use of GNU > autotools/automake/auto... . (I'm not sure what it should be called > anymore.) Regardless, I'm porting a library project, for which I'm a > team member, to using this toolset for building in Linux. I'm to the > point now of writing the Makefile.am file for the actual library. > (There are several other static libraries compiled first that are > sucked into this shared object file.) > > I found some references here: > http://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/automake/manual/html_node/Python.html, > which seemed to be just what I was after. However, I've got a big question > about a file named "module.la" instead of "module.so" which is what we > compile it to now.
I certainly hope module.la is not what it gets compiled to. Open it up with a text editor :). It's just basically a description of the library that libtool makes use of. In the projects that I build, the .la files are all associated with a .a archive or a .so (/.dylib for Macs). Obviously, static archives won't work for Python (and, in particular, I believe you need to compile all of the objects as position independent code, so you need to make sure the appropriate PIC flag is given to the compiler... for g++ that would be -fPIC). > > I guess I should have mentioned some background. Currently, we build > this tool through some homegrown makefiles. This has worked, but > distribution is difficult and our product must now run on an embedded > platform (so building it cleanly requires the use of autotools). > > Basically, I need this thing to install > to /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages when the user invokes "make > install". I thought the variables and primaries discussed at the link > above were what I needed. However, what is a "*.la"? I'm reading up > on libtool now, but will it function the same way as a *.so? To libtool, yes... provided that you *also* have the .so with the same base name as the .la. I don't think compilers themselves make any use of .la files, though. HTH, Jason -- Jason M. Swails BioMaPS, Rutgers University Postdoctoral Researcher -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list