Well, ghci is useful in quick change-compile-test cycles, so I think it does make at least some sense. But I'm not sure ghc-pkg does what you say it does. In hslibs this is handled by this rule: $(GHCI_LIBRARY) :: $(LIBOBJS) ld -r -o $@ $(LIBOBJS) $(STUBOBJS)
ghc-pkg (in version 5.03+) will auto-generate the GHCi libs if you give it the -a option. We don't use this in hslibs or libraries yet.
Hmmm, this doesn't work if there are options different from "-lfoo", which is the case at my site: Configure determines that the options "-L/usr/openwin/lib" and "-R/usr/openwin/lib" must be used here, too.
Firstly, -L and -R should stay in extra_ld_opts.
Secondly, it looks like GHCi bug. It should either search something else than just LD_LIBRARY_PATH for .so libraries, or stop complaining about unknown symbols in hs_libraries. In any case, this is for ghc people.
I must have missed the problem - what actually is going wrong? GHCi looks in several places (not just LD_LIBRARY_PATH) for .so libraries. What is the -R option for? The gcc manual doesn't list it, and the ld manual says it takes a filename, not a directory. Cheers, Simon