> >- what's the use of all the .a files in /usr/lib that got installed when
> >  I detarred the comp.tar.gz file ?
> Those are the static versions of your libraries.

Of course, I knew that. My question was more along the lines of what's the
use of having static libraries ?
I know it can brinbg a noticeable speed improvement, especially with some
fancy compilers, but in the specific case of NetBSD, is there some necessity
for the .a versions ? Maybe to build the kernel (I haven't done it yet, but
will have to in order to use my second swap partition) ?

Also, why are libcompat, libfl, libl, libgcc, liby and librpcsvc only
available as static libraries ? Of course for libl, libfl, libgcc and liby,
their small size makes it useless to share them, but the 20K of librpcsvc
or libcompat seem sufficient to justify a shared-lib version.
Also, what are the libxxx_p.a ? Are these versions with profiling support ?


	Stefan