Re: building libpq.a static library

Jeroen Ooms <jeroen(at)berkeley(dot)edu> writes:
> I maintain static libraries for libpq for the R programming language
> (we need static linking to ship with the binary packages).

How do you get that past vendor packaging policies? When I worked at
Red Hat, there was a very strong policy against allowing any package
to statically embed parts of another one, because it creates serious
management problems if e.g. the other one needs a security update.
I'm sure Red Hat isn't the only distro that feels that way.

I think you'd be better advised to fix things so you can link with
the standard shared-library version of libpq (and whatever else
you're doing this with).

> This works but it's a bit of a pain to maintain. I was wondering if
> this hack could be merged so that the standard 'configure
> --enable-static' script would install a static library for libpq
> alongside the shared one.

FWIW, we used to have support for building static libpq, but
we got rid of it a long time ago. I couldn't find the exact
spot in some desultory trawling of the commit history.

regards, tom lane