From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020826 Description of problem: If you have the lam and libaio packages installed, but not libaio-devel, then hf77 returns the error /usr/bin/ld: cannot find -laio collect2: ld returned 1 exit status The problem is that although libaio.so.1 is in the requires list for lam (which is provided by the libaio package), hf77 actually looks for libaio.so - a symbolic link to libaio.so.1, which is in the libaio-devel package. Either the requirements of the lam package should be changed, or the libaio and libaio-devel packages should be reorganized.
"libaio-devel" (with the .so for linking) is needed to compile programs, not to run lam. Same with gcc-g77 - if you're going to compile, and not have it be a node, you need all the libraries/programs you'll use to create that program.
That would be fair enough if you got the option not to use the aio library, but you don't - it is added automatically. You need libaio-devel to use hf77 at all, even if you are only building a hello world program. Try it!
It's optional for running a program. It's in the same category as a complete set of compilers, glibc-devel, libstdc++-devel etc. if you use it to build programs - and you'll notice that e.g. gcc doesn't require all the "-devel" packages in the distribution even though you could get the same compile errors you're seeing with it.
I wouldn't expect gcc to require all the -devel packages in the distribution, but I would expect it to require any -devel packages that are needed even to compile the simplest of programs, which is the case with hf77 and libaio-devel.