This has been discussed numerous times before... Mixing static and shared libraries isn't supported as linker won't know how to resolve if two compilation units define or use same symbol. Some platforms might enable PIC or PIE by default, but that doesn't eliminate the root cause of why we don't support manually specifying -fPIC.

Fair enough. In general, how would other projects handle this (shared and static), or how should it be done?

Fair enough. In general, how would other projects handle this (shared and static), or how should it be done?

The main binary should be dynamically linked against zlib-ng and the symbols should be re-exported for any modules. This is the best way unless modules of that program can request other modules to be loaded on-demand.

Sure, but the configure script has the option --static. Seems like that doesn't go well with not having -fPIC, since the linker will complain when a project then uses the resulting .a file. Maybe I'm not understanding correctly, I'm just trying to reduce run-time dependencies for easier distribution of my app.

Sure, but the configure script has the option --static. Seems like that doesn't go well with not having -fPIC, since the linker will complain when a project then uses the resulting .a file. Maybe I'm not understanding correctly, I'm just trying to reduce run-time dependencies for easier distribution of my app.

The static flag only works when linking against an executable, not a shared library, that is limitation of the linker, not zlib-ng.

What I meant was the project seems to support a static version of zlib-ng, and it seems that -fPIC is required for that. So I'm saying -fPIC seems to be required.