-rpath linker option?

[Jeffrey Walton]

I'm having trouble with dll hell on Debian and Ubuntu with OpenSSL.
Debian and Ubuntu insist on runtime linking with the copy in /usr/lib.
Fedora and Red Hat are OK because they don't use OpenSSL by default,
so they are not present in /usr/lib.

I've tried specifying a rpath in ld options:

  --with-ld-opt="-rpath=$OPENSSL_LIB_DIR -ldl"

That results in:

  checking for C compiler ... found
   + using GNU C compiler
  checking for --with-ld-opt="-rpath=/usr/local/ssl/lib -ldl" ... not found
  ./auto/configure: error: the invalid value in
--with-ld-opt="-rpath=/usr/local/ssl/lib -ldl"

The path is valid:

  $ ls /usr/local/ssl/lib
  engines      libcrypto.so        libssl.a   libssl.so.1.0.0
  libcrypto.a  libcrypto.so.1.0.0  libssl.so  pkgconfig

LD_LIBRARY_PATH and LD_PRELOAD tricks don't work because they are
dropped when running as root.

Any ideas how to proceed?