As this is my pet project I thought I'd better answer.

Hubert Feyrer wrote:
> 
> is that a bug or a feature that the latest libtool doesn't allow linking
> shared libs against each other any more (at least while still
> uninstalled) any more? It used to work with older libtool.

This is not an a.out/ELF issue its all to do with libtool support for
interdependent library linking - see later.

> (I'm having a look at devel/libgii right now, on which I've used
> USE_LIBTOOL=yes and LIBTOOL_OVERRIDE${WRKSRC}/libtool).

I had a quick look at it also and ran out of time...

> Maybe someone can tell me what I'm missing?
> Is the right way to handle this to remove any attempts to link against
> other (uninstalled) shared libs?

The problem you have hit is that libtool doesn't support linking
uninstalled shared libraries into other shared libraries until 1.3[abc]
(I forget which) - this will become libtool 1.4.

The internal libtool in libgii IIRC is 1.3c - right.

Unfortunately 1.3c doesn't support NetBSD properly or doesn't for all
platforms. It does work on NetBSD/i386 ELF as I've beed working with the
libtool guys to get it to work. The last patch went in last weekend.  

Now as for solving the libgii problem I guess there are several
approaches

i) Hack the libgii build structure to not link against uninstalled
shared libraries.
ii) Patch the internal libtool to work for NetBSD.
iii) Commit a new libtool (I have a pkg already for the cvs version of
libtool) and use this.
iv) others...?

I have no real preference or time this week to do any of them. :-(

Nick