Well, I believe the SCOABSPATH is not only ugly, but also broken (from a libtool perspective): if you have a package which creates two libraries, one depending on the other, your uninstalled library will link against a previous installed version, if that exists. While testing, this is wrong.
I agree its ugly but its a necessary evil. All the point you raise about it being generalized are valid, and I will help out as much as I can to make that happen. But its going to take a while for 2.0 to be adopted. Meanwhile, I believe a new release of 1.5 is imminent, and people are likely to upgrade to that, and it will be around for a while. The problem is, as things currently stand, libtool will create shared libraries that expose a severe security flaw.
Picture this. Someone compiles KDE for their box. It creates a bunch of shared libraries using libtool. kterm is setuid root. A user can now trivially get root on that box if they are running an older release of SCO. The intent of SCOABSPATH was admittedly a little selfish. I would *really* like it if for once, just once, I can pull down a package and do a ./configure; make and have it do the right thing. If I have to maintain my own patched libtool I have to re-autoconf the thing and on some packages, that is very painful. I would really *really* beg that you let me keep the SCOABSPATH thing in as it stands. For normal usage, it doesn't interfere with anybody or anything. Its localized to an OS that a relatively few number of people care about. Its primary user is me, who is pendantic in teh extreme about compiling packages. For example, I always compile twice: first time I do a make install, then I recompile with SCOABSPATH set and to a make install DESTDIR=/whatever for packaging and production. It is by far the safest way to fly. When the more generalized work can be done for 2.0, and more packages adopt it, maybe I wont have to do that. libtool is meant to be a tool for developers. The reality is, there are two of us at SCO that provide 90% of the open source stuff for our platform. I tend to focus on stuff that makes it in-product, and Ron Record does the stuff for our "Skunkware" collection of open source tools. Between the two of us, you've covered about 50% of the users of libtool on SCO platforms :) SCOABSPATH as it currently stands really helps us immensely. Also, with due respect, if you are going to reject the patch just becuase of the SCOABSPATH thing can I please ask you to reconsider? It may look unclean but in reality its really pretty simple ... insert a libtool variable into another libtool variable is an environment variable is set. There are far worse things going on in libtool :) Kean