libtool and 32/64-bit builds

[Bob Friesenhahn]

A number of systems support building both 32 and 64-bit applications.
For example, Solaris knows to look in the subdirectory 'sparcv9' to
find 64-bit versions of libraries.  Unfortunately, libtool expands
libraries that have .la files into a full-path reference to the shared
library.  This breaks the system linker's library search scheme.  The
only way I have found to get 64-bit libraries to work with libtool is
by adding -L and -R options to force libtool to look in the 'sparcv9'
subdirectory.  Many libtoolized packages are broken in that they don't
allow the end user to prepend -L and -R options to LDFLAGS so it can
be difficult to force them to look in a particular directory.

Does libtool include any special smarts on other OSs which support
multiple library types?  It seems like there should be mechanism for
libtool to support locating libraries with an algorithm which is
similar to the system linker.  For example, if -m64 is passed as an
argument to libtool on a Solaris system, it would be nice if it would
look for libraries in a 'sparcv9' subdirectory prior to considering
the parent directory.  Also, if -m64 is provided at library install
time, it would be nice if the library was installed into a 'sparcv9'
subdirectory.

Opinions?

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden
http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen