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 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 GIMP¹ 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.