We use this at my workplace to add $ORIGIN-relative rpaths to third-party dependencies of internal code, since we want to distribute/version those along with the code, not with the OS, and we also don't want to distribute them in the medium of OS packages (so you don't have to be root, so we don't risk messing up the base OS, etc.). In many senses that's just a "non-FHS distro," but it's arguably not a distro at all.
Even for easy-to-compile third-party code, squeezing -Wl,-rpath into all the right places is more of a pain than you'd hope, so we just run patchelf on everything in the third-party directory at the end of the build, regardless of whether the "build" is an actual build or just an untar of proprietary software.
Even for easy-to-compile third-party code, squeezing -Wl,-rpath into all the right places is more of a pain than you'd hope, so we just run patchelf on everything in the third-party directory at the end of the build, regardless of whether the "build" is an actual build or just an untar of proprietary software.