Library dependencies

[Conn Copas]

GRASS'ers

I have what is really a Unix/C question, however it is relevant to this whole
issue of 'why are people scared to compile GRASS'?

On our Solaris 5.3 system, one of the Motif libraries (libXm.so.2) fails to
link unless the symbols 'regex' and 'regcmp' are defined in an additional
library which, by trial-and-error, I discovered to be /usr/ccs/lib/libgen.a.
Comp.lang.c is full of such titbits about inter-library dependencies, but
where does all this expertise originally come from? ie, what I would like is
some systematic method of interrogating the system in order to find out where
various symbols are defined. One low-level way of doing it is to write a
program which trawls through every lib file and invokes dlsym(), but I had
something a bit more user-friendly in mind. Am I missing something here?

-- 
Conn V Copas
Information Technology Division
Defence Science and Technology Organisation
PO Box 1500
Salisbury            tel: +61 (0)8 25 95349
SA  5108             fax: +61 (0)8 25 96781
Australia       e-mail: cvc at itd.dsto.gov.au
-------------------------------------------