I seem to remember someone else reporting this, but it's been a while. I
run the 19990704 ELF x86 snapshot with a 1.4K kernel (yes, it is time to
upgrade :), the system is nice and stable as usual but suffers from a
strange build system related problem.

It manifests primarily with GNU software that builds .so with
libtool...executables linked against shared objects in temporary build
dirs (example: ../somedir/.libs/libfoo.so) seem to not understand when
that .so is available via LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Hence, after installing app
into /usr/local/bin and libfoo.so into /usr/local/lib, we get something
like this:

# /usr/local/bin/foo
cannot locate shared object ../somedir/.libs/libfoo.so

# mkdir -p ../somedir/.libs
# cp /usr/local/lib/libfoo.so ../somedir/.libs
# /usr/local/bin/foo
foo!

# cd ..
# /usr/local/bin/foo
cannot locate shared object ../somedir/.libs/libfoo.so

and so on...

I was actually able to get the latest GNOME built and working even with
this problem; it required some creative use of symlinks. Blech. ;)

I'm upgrading to a more recent -current anyway, so maybe this prob will
just go away with the upgrade. Then again...perhaps this is a known
issue with the -current toolchain? If so, are there any workarounds or
fixes known? 

tia,

--
nverenin@san.rr.com