[sane-devel] Re: Disable static libraries by default?

[Michael Piotrowski]

Henning Meier-Geinitz <henning at meier-geinitz.de> writes:

> I'm currently looking into updating libtool in the SANE distribution.
>
> While testing other things I wondered if it makes sense to disbale
> static libraries by default (AC_DISABLE_STATIC). They can be enabled
> manually by ./configure --enable-static . If shared libraries are nor
> possible on a platform, static is enabled by default.
>
> The reason is simple: time. See a comparison (latest CVS, in seconds):
>           
> 	             both       shared only
> time make:          188.7       124.4    
> time make install:   10.5         7.9
>
> Comments?

Since libtool effectively compiles the sources twice to build one set
of non-PIC objects and one set of PIC objects, I'd have expected the
overhead to be even larger.  Nevertheless, I think it's a good idea to
only build shared libraries by default; typically static libraries
aren't used anyway if shared libraries are available.

-- 
Michael Piotrowski, M.A.                                  <mxp at dynalabs.de>