Since it'll apparently remain a mystery how to tame the build system to do what you want it to do and link/rpath the libraries consistently, a workaround is to just ignore it -- and fix the link AFTER the build's done. Noting On Tue, Apr 7, 2015, at 07:06 PM, Jeffrey Walton wrote: > As far as I know, you only need an RPATH on Linux (OS X and Android > are a different story). After the build, since there's no proper RPATH for the libssl.so with any combination of FLAGs that I've been able to figure out, ldd libssl.so.1.0.0 | egrep "ssl|crypto" libcrypto.so.1.0.0 => /lib/libcrypto.so.1.0.0 (0x00007f55e46c0000) readelf --dynamic libssl.so.1.0.0 | egrep -i "rpath|runpath" (empty) For anyone actually interested this does the trick patchelf --set-rpath "/path/to/ssl/lib" --force-rpath libssl.so.1.0.0 readelf --dynamic libssl.so.1.0.0 | egrep -i "rpath|runpath" 0x000000000000000f (RPATH) Library rpath: [/path/to/ssl/lib] ldd libssl.so | egrep "ssl|crypto" libcrypto.so.1.0.0 => /path/to/ssl/lib/libcrypto.so.1.0.0 (0x00007f476b4fc000)