Building shared libraries with static libraries in them

Appologies if this is the wrong list, and if it is can someone direct me to
the right one.

I am having a problem building a shared library. The library uses a
third-party library from Reuters. The third party library  consists of one
.so and a number of .a files. 

The problem I am having revolves around an undefined symbol used by one of
the .a lib files. I believe this is because the .a files are static and even
though I am statically linking these file because I am building a shared
library the fies are not linked into the resulting .so file. The solution to
this is normally to add these static libraries to the client application at
build time as well, the problem is that the shared library I am building is
a JNI library dynamically linked by java. I cannot rebuild the java
executable witht hese files statically linked.

Is my thinking about statically linking in dynamic libraries correct ? Is
there any was around this problem ?

Getting the third party to build me some static libraries is not an option
because they are saying they cannot supply them for at least 6 months and I
don't have that sort of time.

I am using gcc 2.96 on a Red Hat 7.0 box. I am using version 1.4.1 of java,
though I don't think that is related to the problem. Out of interest I get a
similar problem on Solaris, although a Win32 version works fine.

Many thanks

Simon



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