No, it won't work. This is my area of expertise and I can unequivocally state that it is not possible to solve this problem on a unix system. The linker infrastructure does not exist, and here's why:

RPATH (or better RUNPATH) has intractable conflicts in library dependencies. For example, this cannot work for any application which uses dlopen() and packages its loadable modules independently of the invoking binary. This is a problem for very high profile software such as:

* Apache, and just about any other application server with a plugin interface * Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, and just about every other interpreted/VM oriented language

Furthermore, there exists other intractable conflicts in complex library dependency interactions. For example:

bin/A needs SONAME=B.so.1 needs SONAME=C.so.1 (v1)

bin/B needs SONAME=D.so.1 which needs both SONAME=C.so.1 (v2, incompatible) and SONAME=B.so.1

The dependency relationship of every shared object in this chain are not static, and you cannot modify the invoking binaries (where RPATH must be set) every time an intermediate shared object changes its linking requirements. You also cannot guarantee ordering when a single node depends on multiple libraries -- the order of evaluation is non-deterministic. You might say this is a corner case, but you would be surprised when you try at scale. This is not a corner case.

Seriously, I understand everything about this. Can't be done. You feel free to try it out and see that it doesn't.