It's perfectly possible to be laboring under the illusion that what you're doing is working and, it also may seem that way.
The patch I posted compiled, but created a new directory (see mistake 1). I have no idea why it compiled, but it did and so I just assumed that will be correct.
This time, the moments when I didn't keep a log came back to bite me.
Mistake 1) getting confuzzled and switching prefixes -- I ended up with libgtest and gtestlib. One of the worked but was wrong; the other was correct, but broken.
Mistake 2) Littering. I left an exploration hack around which added an extra 'lib' to one of the macro expansion and ended up with liblibgtest being sought. Plus I forgot I had done it and had to sleuth for 10 mins.
Mistake 3) Not changing all occurences of gtest properly.
Mistake 4) not having a test for 'correct compile', and I didn't even consider what 'done' means...
