[MPlayer-users] why --enable-static is not working. what does it do?

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 10:32:02AM +0000, Carl Eugen Hoyos wrote:
> Reyada Wolak <reyada.wolak <at> gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > what is the use of --enable-static
> 
> It builds static binaries of the libraries that are part of an MPlayer snapshot,
> like libavutil, libavformat, libavcodec and libswscale.
> The (imo unsupported) alternative is to link dynamically against these libraries.
> 
> I believe what you want is to pass "-static" to the linking process.

That last part is exactly what it does, the part before is wrong.
And it obviously can only work if you have static libs (.a instead of .so)
for everything.
Except that static linking is a really bad idea for libs like X11, ALSA
etc., e.g. ALSA will fail really badly if you linked statically against a
library that uses a different version of the kernel API than the system
it runs on in the end.