Re: $ORIGIN support for Libtool

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Ethan,

* Ethan Mallove wrote on Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 10:14:13PM CET:
> I am using the run-time linker $ORIGIN variable with Libtool in an
> apparently unsupported way to create relocatable objects.

Yep.  Sorry, but Libtool doesn't support $ORIGIN yet.
Currently, the best bet for relocatable packages with Libtool is using
the relocatable* modules from gnulib on top.

For adding $ORIGIN support to Libtool, one of the first questions to
address is how to degrade gracefully on systems that do not provide such
a feature.  The next is to research in which ways $ORIGIN support in
systems that do have it, differ.  (IIRC Solaris and GNU/Linux were quite
similar, but there are more?)

The practical question of there being quite a few places in the ltmain
script that currently assume absolute paths, is a different matter, but
I think that can be fixed straightforwardly once we are firm on the
desired semantics.

Cheers,
Ralf