Request for option to disable building of static library

[Sander Niemeijer]

Hi,

Currently libtool supports the option to globally enable/disable 
building of shared and/or static libraries through the --enable-... 
options for configure or the AC_/AM_DISABLE_... macro's.
When creating a library, libtool also has an extra option '-static' 
that can be passed at link time in order to disable the creation of the 
shared version.
What I am now currently looking for is exactly the opposite; a way to 
tell libtool to ignore building a static version and only build a 
shared version.

In our situation it is not possible to just disable building of static 
libraries on a global level for our package, since our package provides 
multiple libraries and some of them need to be provided in both static 
and shared versions.
A few other libraries, however, are plug-ins (modules created with the 
'-module' flag) that only need to be delivered as shared libraries. For 
these specific libraries I would like to have an option (e.g. 
-no-static) to tell libtool to omit building the static version.

Currently I have resolved this issue by just building both static and 
shared versions of our plug-in libraries and deleting the static 
version with a automake INSTALL_EXEC_HOOK_TARGETS target, but I would 
prefer it if we could eliminate the building of the static version of 
our plug-in libraries.

Does anybody know whether such a -no-static option for the libtool link 
mode is feasable?
Can this be implemented by just adding a -no-static option to libtool 
that sets the internal libtool variable 'build_old_libs' to 'no' or 
would such a feature require some more effort?

Regards,
Sander Niemeijer