Is it possible to have the default build for unix-dll.mak include in some way -R$(libdir) for compiling gsx and gsc when compiling ghostscript as a shared object, so that i don't have to modify the make file/teach users to use LD_LIBRARY_PATH also it'd be great during install to have all the scripts in the bin directory so that the GS_EXECUTABLE=gsc ... :)
In theory yes. GNU ld even accepts -R, but it's probably safer to make it conditional. But I'd like to understand the motivation better. On linux, the default libdir is /usr/local/lib, and it's normal to configure the runtime linker to look there. Why don't you prefer this on Solaris? Or do you mean -R$(SOBINDIR) for running uninstalled?
I never install anything in /usr/local ... if you look around you'll find a lot of docs that point out that all 'optional' software is expected to be installed in /opt, and that is the standard for solaris ... it also makes it a lot easier to to work out what comes with the system as precompiled and what the operator user has placed there. in the case of ghostscript i install in /opt/gs<ver> and cd to /opt and 'ln -s gs<ver> ghostscript' this allows me to have multiple installs of different versions easier to test to see if the new version works whilst all users access whichever version is currently linked to /opt/ghostscript. Not sure that many people compile GS as a shared object on Solaris (in fact since noone else seems to have noticed that the 8.6* version don't compile i'd say that it's pretty few) but not having the full run path to the shared object in the gsx and gsc makes the job quite a bit harder :) I only suggested the inclusion of the '-R' path because i type it in myself every time i come to compile gs so. I only suggested the '-R' rather than the long '-W,--runpath=' or whatever because i generally only ever use -R, cos it works :) I may be wrong but since /usr/local/lib doesn't exist by default on solaris boxes it may not be in the automatic search path, but having the runpath coded in seems better for completeness.
Grabbing a Ralph's bugs.
Enhancement still missing in Ghostscript 9.03
> Enhancement still missing in Ghostscript 9.03 This works on OpenSolaris ... but that might just be down to a newer version of GCC(In reply to comment #4)
Generally, I recommend using LD_PRELOAD or equivalent. Alternatively, XLDFLAGS on the make command line can be used to add custom linker arguments.