I *think* (and you know how much trouble I get into when I do that!) that this static linking has more to do with insurance against volatile API changes than it does with technical linkage issues.
The technical issue for using archive libraries is simply that the environment that the consumers live in (cross platform *ix,pc,mac) has no consistant, predictable and reliable way to deploy and use versioned DSOs. Such an environment would need to take into account vendor-delivered libs as well as local admin and user generated libs (download the src, build it, link against your most recent libs...) $0.02 -John Danek Duvall wrote: > If there's no technical reason for people to use archive libraries (and > there almost certainly isn't) and we're not going to break application > builds by removing them, then I'd much rather not ship them (as long as the > shared libraries are easily generated).
