Portably setting library search paths by passing -R or -rpath

[Frank Lahm]

Hello all,

in our package (netatalk) we consume Berkeley-DB.
We have a configure option --with-bdb that can take a <path>

In order to properly test and use the library at <path>, we must pass
-R <path> or -Wl,-rpath=<path> with LDFLAGS/CFLAGS on some (maybe
all?) platforms.

As the correct way to give that option that most linkers will call
rpath to the compiler frontend so that it passes it to the linker
varies:
is there a portable way to do this?

Thanks!

Regards
-Frank