[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> It would be nice if one of you automake wizards could put in some way to
> build ethereal staticly. I used to be able to simply edit the makefile and
> add -static in the appropriate place and then have it relink the executable.
> It's not nearly so easy any more.

...and part of the problem is that, if the dynamic linking capability is
present, you *CANNOT*, on some platforms, link it completely statically,
period.  On those platforms, *only* dynamically-linked binaries - or, at
least, binaries dynamically linked with at least one library, e.g.  the
standard C library - get to use "dlopen()".

(Then again, on at least one of those platforms, namely SunOS 5.x, I'm
not sure the vendor even guarantees that *completely* statically-linked
binaries will work on releases later than the one on which they were
built....)

It *might* be possible to arrange to statically link with non-system
libraries, but I'm not enough of an automake/autoconf/libtool wizard to
know what the right buttons to push are to do that.