It seems that svr3 and svr5 differ, after all.

libraries.  What's worse, the directories given in LD_LIBRARY_PATH are
checked first!  Therefore, we need a hack to prepend all the
directories we give with -L to the current value of LD_LIBRARY_PATH,
thereby temporarly forming a hacked value.

Only copy LIBEXTRAS if they are given.

Svr5 doesn't use -z allextract...

-shared rather than -G.

applications, at least on the platforms where it's known how
to do it.

Note: this has only been tested on GNU-based platforms (Linux), and
needs to be tested on all others.  Additionally, it's not yet
supported on the following platforms, for lack of information:

Darwin (MacOS X)
Cygwin
OSF1/Alpha
SVR3
ReliantUNIX

Please help out with testing and the platforms we don't yet know well
enough.

assignment (modulo those I missed) individual statements.

Makefiles... I suppose it wasn't tested very much...

0.9.7-stable.

Add missing semicolons.
Add a comment explaining a bunch of targets without any action lines.

idea why, but that was definitely wrong...

Make sure test doesn't barf because of missing spaces before the
closing ].
Add -lc to the list of libraries we depend upon.  Not always
necessary, but never hurts.

wrong, and my test engine doesn't show it.  The verbosity will be
temporary for about a day.

shared library, set those flags conditionally.

at all, and in all other cases, make sure foo.so is linked to
foo.so.{soversion}.

Add a variant of SHLIB_SOVER without the preceding period.

the version in the file name.

helper makefile that generalises our way of building shared libraries
and is designed to take care of almost anything (I hope).