serious libtool 1.4 breakage?

[Brian May <bam@debian.org>]

Hello,

It seems that libtool 1.4 is seriously broken with respect to creating
Debian packages, as per bug #98342.

In short, problems occur because libtool now supports interdependencies
between shared libraries, but this is broken when doing a

make install prefix=`pwd`/debian/tmp/usr 

as libtool currently assumes that the libraries will be installed in
/usr/lib (as specified to the configure script), and it attempts to
relink the libraries at install time. However, libtool fails to
realize that the installed libraries do not exist in /usr/lib, and the
link command fails.

To get it going again, I would imagine the link command needs to have
a parameter like "-L `pwd`/debian/tmp/usr/lib", which tells it that
the libraries do not exist in the standard location.

However, when I posted a message to the libtool mailing list (see the
above bug report), I only received one reply, and that was: "[...] 
when relinking is necessary, you must not use a different prefix to
install than the one used to build."


I find this response unsatisfactory for two reasons:

1. everything was working fine. Perhaps upgrading libc6 2.2.2 to 2.2.3
broke something, I don't know. I just know that I did build Heimdal
correctly, and it is fully installed and working.

2. it is simply not possible to build Debian packages while adhering
to this artificial restriction.


I have not had any response to my message though. I don't know if this means

1. that they agree it is a serious problem and are busy fixing it; OR

2. that they don't consider it a serious problem and aren't doing
anything to fix it.


I have tried looking at the code myself, but cannot work out anything
which could cause such a major change.

Oh, for reference my detected system type is:

host_alias=
host=i686-pc-linux-gnu

Is there anything that would have caused this to change? (not
including changes to autoconf, automake or libtool)?
-- 
Brian May <bam@debian.org>