The current stable (amd64) ebuild for dev-games/irrlicht, 1.5.1, only builds a static library. It would be nice if it were possible to build a shared library (and it seems to me that should be the default). In the case of Irrlicht, I think this would be especially beneficial since a shared library could link to its dependencies so users of Irrlicht wouldn't have to know about them. For a description, see http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-772469-highlight-irrlicht.html. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce:
in general, it isnt as simple as saying "let's make it a shared library". you need to consider all the requirements surrounding the move from static to shared. in the case of Irrlicht, it does support a shared library mode ("sharedlib"), so we can build both. but if upstream doesnt support it, then we arent going to either.
I don't use irrlicht so it might still need work, but I made it build/install the .so file as well. Give it a try and submit patches if it needs more to work for you.
Thanks for the update. I re-emerged it and now I've got a shared lib, too. However, I did discover that it has a dependency on libbz2 but isn't linked against it. So I think if -lbz2 were added in the creation of the .so, it would work fine. A minor nit is that it doesn't create a symlink named just libIrrlicht.so. But that's easy to fix manually.
