Sticky --disable-shared

[Alessandro Vesely]

Hi all,
yesterday I compiled three packages, libgcrypt, gnutls and 
courier-mta, that use one another's library. I started off building 
gcrypt as a static library to avoid cross-problems with the stable 
debian version of the same package being use by the running mail 
server. Then, I got an error building gnutls: The linker couldn't 
resolve the cry_... references to libgcrypt functions.

I write to ask if that's a bug or a feature, and if it belongs to 
libtool, gcc, or ld. The command "libtool ... -lgcrypt ..." was being 
changed to "gcc ... /usr/local/lib/libgcrypt.a ... -Wl,--rpath 
-Wl,/usr/local/lib" and resulted in an ld error. (Why?) A command line 
like "gcc ... -lgcrypt ...", reversing libtool's hard path, succeeded. 
I've only been able to cleanly build gnutls after configuring with 
--disable-shared. Ditto for courier-mta, with exchanged roles. 
Curiously, the latter package sports no shared libraries, thus the 
option must be a leftover from boilerplate (libtool?) stuff.

I think static libraries are probably safer in this case, where each 
package has a different version. However, I'm not sure why it is just 
not possible to build shared ones. Any clue?

TIA
Ale