relinking and buildroots

[Jens Petersen]

Hello,

It is a well known problem with libtool (at least in the
packaging business!) that relinking breaks things when
packages are make install'ed in a buildroot rather than in
the final runtime destination.  There seem to be various
workarounds and fixes available, but it seems it would be
much better if this could be fixed upstream in the libtool
distribution itself.

The best patch I have come across is the one attributed to
maddog in Mandrake's libtool package.  I don't have any
problem with the patch, but Alexandre Oliva told me he would
prefer an implementation that avoids adding a new prefix
(-inst-prefix-dir) to libtool.  I am still not very familiar
with libtool's internals, but last month spent a chunk of
time looking into this (see
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=58664
for my naive wanderings), and came to the conclusion that it
looks rather hard to avoid using -inst-prefix-dir, since in
the final invocation of libtool there is really no way for
libtool to know what the DESTDIR prefix should be.  But I
would like to solicit opinions from the libtool community on
this matter, before taking it further.

So any comments please on the above and the patch below?

Cheers, Jens

libtool-1.4.2-relink.patch
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