>>And it's certainly beyond my comprehension why one has to do -Wl,-R
>>but not -Wl,-L (contrasted to the simple -L/-R on other compilers
>>(at least one other (sun) comes to mind here)).
>
>The main problem is that many, many, programs assume that "-L" is enough,
>so I spend a lot of time editing files.

But it isn't; on Solaris you need -R, on Irix you need -rpath, and so on.
They should be either using libtool, or know that in some cases you need
extra arguments.

(If they're autoconf based, I sometimes set LDFLAGS to the right value;
that generally works okay).

--Ken