E. Liddell posted on Mon, 19 Mar 2012 12:26:52 -0400 as excerpted:

> The long version:  Trinity, the fork of KDE3, is currently in the middle
> of converting from the old autotools-based KDE build system to a more
> maintainable setup based on cmake.

> The best we've managed to be able to do is get the builds to reach the
> linker stage, where they break due to missing libraries which we seem to
> be unable to reinject—append-libs and various methods of manipulating
> LDFLAGS within the ebuilds seem to do nothing.

I've no idea if this will help or not, or whether you've tried it or not, 
but...

It occurs to me that kde3 was probably "sunsetted" before gentoo's switch 
to --as-needed linker flags by default.  Now I switched to --as-needed 
here, long before gentoo switched its default, and /think/ I was running 
that here for some time before I upgraded to kde4.  If I'm correct, then 
kde3 as it was back then, at least, could run with --as-needed, but I'm 
not sure if it stayed that way or what patches gentoo might have already 
been using at the time in ordered to make it work, that might well need 
updating to /keep/ it working.

So, umm... yeah, try disabling the --as-needed linking, thus triggering 
overlinking in many cases, but possibly helping here, and see if it helps.

But I'm not the autotools guru you're looking for.  Sorry.  This kinda 
sorta sounds like it might help, but maybe not, too.  Maybe it's a 
combination of this so it doesn't ignore your appended libs, tho, and 
actually appending the libs?  That's what I thought of first when reading 
your description, but I'd guess you've already tried it, too.  Still, 
it's worth the suggestion, just in case...

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman