> What's more of a problem here is that libtool actually links > dependency libraries of dependencies ... it's something I've been > working on for a while.
That's a bug, not a feature. From libtool's perspective at least. You have to keep in mind that libtool is designed to work around extremely broken behaviour in legacy systems, and there *are* some systems where the behaviour you point out is required. Libtool's general approach to the problem leaves something to be desired, that's correct. It basically punishes every system it supports because of the sins of a few. I've always thought that the correct solution in Debian's context would be to have a ltmain.sh script *for* Debian, command-line compatible with upstream's, but implementing whatever's right for us: inter-library dependencies, no rpath, stuff like that. The other option of course is to actually fix libtool to do the right thing on gnu-linux systems. But that's a sizeable ammount of work. -- Marcelo