Support for building as static library

[Greg Hudson]

On 6/30/22 11:57, Thomas Sondergaard wrote:
> So I thought I'd ask here: What is the state
> of support for building krb5 as a static library?

It's mostly unsupported.

The addition of library plugin frameworks meant that some core
functionality (such as KDB modules) is loaded in at runtime via
dlopen().  That can't work if all of the libraries are built as static.
 It could potentially work if the plugin libraries are built as shared
and the core libraries are built as static, but I haven't investigated
that route.

In 2009 I added very limited support for --enable-static
--disable-shared, motivated by a lack of support for shared libraries in
gcov at the time.  This support required significant build system
contortions to link in the in-tree KDB plugin modules at build time.
That support doesn't extend to preauth modules and k5tls, so the result
is a somewhat restricted libkrb5.  gcov has added support for shared
libraries, so the riginal motivation for the change has disappeared.

I would consider a pull request to remove the current --enable-static
--disable-shared support, and instead always build shared plugin
libraries and load them at runtime from static core libraries, if that
works on modern platforms.  But I don't know if that would meet the
needs of people who want static library builds.