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 section The LT_INIT macro). This prevents libtool from building shared libraries, which has several advantages:

• compilation is twice as fast, which can speed up your development cycle,
• debugging is easier because you don’t need to deal with any complexities added by shared libraries, and
• you can see how libtool behaves on static-only platforms.

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 GIMP(7) distribution ‘README’:

The GIMP uses GNU Libtool in order 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’.

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