I think their goal is to provide the possibility of a "local" install of the library, so if you have multiple user accounts on one server all using the payflow pro library, they can each have their own install.

But, of course, I imagine very few systems include those directories in the path for ldconfig to search.

So, I used this technique and was still having trouble, until I made sure the directory I was putting libpfpro.so in was getting searched by ldconfig, and then running ldconfig to make the system recognize the existence of the library.

So, if "make test" works, and "make install" seems to work, but then running "perl test.pl" fails, complaining about being unable to locate libpfpro.so, make sure libpfpro.so is in something like '/usr/lib' or '/usr/local/lib' (and that those directories get indexed by ldconfig ref: /etc/ld.so.conf) and then run ldconfig. You will need root or sudo for that, though.

Hopefully that will save someone else the hours of frustration and anger I had yesterday. :-\

OTOH: now I know way more about Makefile.PL internals and ld.so than I did two days ago.