Octave-forge and 'pkg install' question

[E. Joshua Rigler]

Hi all,

My system is a 64-bit Intel Xeon machine that runs Redhat Enterprise
Linux v4.  I have discovered that many of Redhat's standard library
packages fail to create the lib*.so symbolic links in the /usr/lib64
(or /usr/X11/lib64) subdirectories, even though the actual 64-bit
library files (i.e., lib*.so.X.Y) are present and valid.  The result
is that many source code distributions that need to link to these
libraries end up trying, and failing, to link to 32-bit versions of
the library instead.  My solution is to create a directory called
/tmp/lib64, generate the necessary symbolic links there, and compile
everything with the -L/tmp/lib64 option (I do NOT have root access to
this machine).

Now, I recently compiled and installed Octave 3.0.1.  It took a little
effort, but using the solution described above (plus a few other
necessary tricks), everything finished, and 'make check' came back
perfect.  However, when I tried to install the Octave-forge package
'plot' using "pkg install plot-1.0.4.tar.gz", I got errors related to
the fact that the compiler was unable to link to libX11.so, for the
very reason described above.  I assume any Octave-forge package that
requires compiling and linking against such libraries will also fail.

So, my question is:  How does one force the pkg package installer to
compile things with user-provided flags (LDFLAGS=-L/tmp/lib64 for
example)?  Or do I just need to compile and install these packages by
hand?

-EJR