Y'know, someone (not me?  ;)  needs to audit the toolchain to find
`discoveries' like this, which is on the order of rpath.

It seems that interlibrary dependencies (one library linking with another)
DOES indeed work on a.out, and should work even in 1.3.x.

This means that things like:

ld -Bshareable -o lib1name.so.X.Y ...
ld -Bshareable -o lib2name.so.X.Y ... -L. -R${PREFIX}/lib -llib1
cc -o progname -R${PREFIX}/lib -L. -llib2

works - "progname" will link with lib2 at runtime.

The support was written years ago by mrg, and I just verified it.  It is
probably likely that the a.out X11 setup for 1.3.x doesn't have `correct'
interdependencies, so that may not be easily fixable, but this does mean
that things like the tiff problem (libtiff depends on libjpeg) become MUCH
easier to solve.

However, this does assume dropping support for PIC in pkgsrc, which I'm not
necessarily willing to advocate myself.  (Although I know someone here who
probably is.  8-)

-- 
-- Todd Vierling (Personal tv@pobox.com; Bus. todd_vierling@xn.xerox.com)