help: disabling relinking stupidity in libtool

[Ari Pollak <ari@debian.org>]

[ Please CC me on all replies ]

I'm the current maintainer of the gimp1.3 package. libgimp1.3 contains 
more than a few libraries, most of which contain interdependencies to 
other libraries in the same package. This causes a problem as far as 
interoperation between libtool & dpkg-shlibdeps goes - when libtool 
installs the libraries, it relinks them incorrectly so that libraries in 
/usr/lib get used before the freshly built libraries contained in the 
package itself. So what ends up happening is a bunch of mismatched 
dependencies in the installed .so:

$ ldd debian/libgimp1.3/usr/lib/libgimpui-1.3.so.15
        libgimp-1.3.so.14 => /usr/lib/libgimp-1.3.so.14 (0x40022000)
        libgimpwidgets-1.3.so.14 => /usr/lib/libgimpwidgets-1.3.so.14 
(0x40039000)
        libgimpbase-1.3.so.15 => not found

I know this is only a problem when installing because the library 
created with just a 'make' does not depend on any older gimp libraries 
in /usr/lib, but instead depends on the current version of all of the 
libraries.
So anyway, my question is this - is it at all possible to simply get 
libtool not to relink when installing, or else solve the problem some 
other way? The only alternative would be to copy the originally built 
shared libries manually, but that's really ugly.