5.6 Static-only libraries

When you are developing a package, it is often worthwhile to configure your package with the --disable-shared flag, or to override the defaults for LT_INIT by using the disable-shared option (see The LT_INIT macro). This prevents libtool from building shared libraries, which has several advantages:

You may want to put a small note in your package README to let other developers know that --disable-shared can save them time. The following example note is taken from the GIMP7 distribution README:

The GIMP uses GNU Libtool to build shared libraries on a
variety of systems.  While this is very nice for making usable
binaries, it can be a pain when trying to debug a program.  For that
reason, compilation of shared libraries can be turned off by
specifying the --disable-shared option to configure.

Footnotes

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GNU Image Manipulation Program, for those who haven’t taken the plunge. See http://www.gimp.org/.