MAC OS X, static compilation and libtool

[George Bosilca]

I run into some troubles with the latest version of libtool (2.2). I  
didn't notice this problem with older libtool versions, but a coworker  
confirm it with 1.5.22. To be honest I don't know if it's a libtool  
problem or a MAC OS X, or whatever.

The problem is when I compile an application with a libtool enabled  
library (Open MPI for the sake of completeness). This only happen when  
the library is compiled with the "--enable-static --disable-shared",  
all other cases seems to perform as expected. By default libtool  
propose some linking flags that seems sufficient on most Unix  
environments, except on MAC OS X. For some obscure reasons, MAC OS X  
always try to link with shared libraries based on the default path  
(and Open MPI is shipped by Apple with Leopard), instead of following  
the -L path as specified by the user on the link command.

After digging into the gcc man pages, I found that in order to have  
the expected behavior (or at least what I think is expected: look into  
the user provided lib path for all libraries independing if they are  
static or dynamic) one has to add the -Wl,-search_paths_first flags to  
the link command. From the gcc documentation, it seems that this is  
not necessarily MAC OS X specific (but I didn't test it elsewhere).

I was pondering if I should add a special check in our configure for  
detecting this case or there is a nicer libtool based way of handling  
this.

  Thanks,
    george.

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