libtool issues

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith]

I am maintainer of the science/vis5d+ port.  It doesn't build on the 
i386 with FreeBSD-8.0-RELEASE, as is shown here:

http://pointyhat.freebsd.org/errorlogs/i386-errorlogs/a.8.20110223062852/vis5d+-1.2.1_15.log

I know that other ports have this problem such as science/libctl.  This 
port is currently marked broken for exactly this reason.

I have a work around at this PR: ports/155105.  This work around was 
improved in ports/155655 (see the follow up comment by the maintainer, 
who submits a patch to libctl).

I also reported the problem at ports/155546, although I don't think my 
solution there is very good, and my description of the bug wa very 
incomplete.  Furthermore, it turns out that this problem does not take 
place under the FreeBSD-8.2-STABLE.  This can make the problem a little 
bit hard to diagnose.  Nevertheless I can see this problem recurring 
systematically again in the future, because libtool was not designed for 
multiple compiler environments.

It would be great to find a work around.  One way would be to put in 
some kind of construction like ports/155105 or ports/155655 into 
Mk/bsd.autotools.mk.  So whenever the port has USE_LIBTOOLS set, we have 
the following code

LIBTOOLS_DIR=${WRKDIR}/.libtools.dir.${PORTNAME}.${PREFIX:S/\//_/g}
${LN} -s ${LOCALBASE}/bin/${CC} ${LIBTOOLS_DIR}/cc
${LN} -s ${LOCALBASE}/bin/${CXX} ${LIBTOOLS_DIR}/c++
MAKE_ENV+= PATH=${LIBTOOLS_DIR}:$$PATH

Or one could instead modify devel/libtools, maybe something like this. 
Rename bin/libtool to libexec/libtool.sh, and then rewrite the libtool 
script as something like:

#!/bin/sh
PREFIX=/usr/local
TEMPCCDIR=`mktemp -d -t /tmp`
export PATH=${WRKDIR}:$PATH
${LN} -s ${LOCALBASE}/bin/${CC} ${TEMPCCDIR}/cc
${LN} -s ${LOCALBASE}/bin/${CXX} ${TEMPCCDIR}/c++
${PREFIX}/libexec/libtool.sh $@
rm -r ${TEMPCCDIR}

I know these are real hacks.  But since we are trying to patch something 
into libtool that it really isn't designed for, perhaps my hackish 
approach has advantages.  In particular, one doesn't have to redesign 
different patches every time there is a libtool version update.

Just some ideas.  In the meantime, do you think it is OK to commit 
ports/155105 and the libctl part of ports/155655?  It would be nice to 
get these ports working again on the i386, at least on a temporary basis.

Thanks, Stephen