RPATH not working in wxWidget

At my company we have the sandbox. This uses different free libraries that we compile within a specific directory (to not have problems with the system installation of a customer.) This means you need to include an RPATH in the binary (.ELF) files.

Most of the libraries that we use have a modern configure script that uses libtool. libtool knows how to automatically add the RPATH information to the libraries and binaries generated in a project.

The wxWidget library has a configuration script too, but it does not support the AC_PROG_LIBTOOL definition. This is annoying, to say the least. It took me quite a while to find a remedy to this problem. It was actually very simple, but not a usual way to fix this sort of problems!

I added the -rpath command line option to the LDFLAGS variable before calling the configure script. Thus, something like this:

LDFLAGS="... -Wl,-rpath -Wl,/usr/lib/mo/$VERSION/lib" ./configure ...

Then each time a link happens, it gets that additional command line option and automatically adds the RPATH to the libraries and tools of wxWidget. Now, it works a lot better and we do not have to mess around with the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable!

Click for more info about the sandbox.