PerlMagick quandary

Maybe 12 years ago I decided that ImageMagick (and subsequently 
GraphicsMagick) should build as static by default.  This avoided 
problems when shared libraries were not available.  At the time, 
PerlMagick was able to build fine as a static 'PerlMagick' and 
successfully run its tests.

Unfortunately, Perl's support for building a static PerlMagick seems 
to be falling by the wayside.  Many OS distributions neglect to 
include libperl.a, and it seems that versions of Perl newer than 5.8.8 
are no longer able to run the Perl test suite using a static perl 
interpreter.  Compounding this problem is that when GraphicsMagick is 
built using shared libraries, some operating systems (e.g. FreeBSD) 
will ignore LD_LIBRARY_PATH so that the PerlMagick tests test using an 
installed libGraphicsMagick.so rather than the one which is about to 
be installed.  It is quite inconvenient to have to install software in 
order to test it.

Quite a lot has changed in the past 12 years.  Now the problematic 
libraries which caused problems are usually provided with the OS as 
shared libraries.  Perhaps it is time to enable shared builds by 
default.

Any thoughts regarding this issue are appreciated.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
[email protected], http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/

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