Back when we were forced to remove USE=static for bogus policies, we ended up always installing static libraries due to yet another bogus policy. We should stop that, as there are absolutely NO consumers of the static libraries for 95% of the GNOME packages. They are maybe useful only for the C++ bindings, and glib (syslog-ng could use it, and it resides in /bin, while glib in /usr). So we could either be exclusive of static libraries and have some variable that eclass looks to pass --disable-static, or inclusive and by default do that and have exceptions for glib and co. Or we just pass --disable-static for most packages in G2CONF separately. What sounds like the best approach here? Note that there is still some discussion to do about this on gentoo-dev as well, for making sure no-one is coming after us for not installing static libraries anymore because vapier said we must. Shipping static libraries appears to be the primary reason why GNOME does not fit on the LiveCD anymore and they had to start using XFCE just because others in the team honored the USE=static + always install static libs statement (I'm not happy about that if you didn't figure yet :P).
I blame midori, apparently it re-posts when going back in history to the submit response *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 241896 ***
