static libraries

Hi, why don't many mingw32-xxx packages provide static (non-dll) versions of libraries ? For example no libz.a in mingw32-zlib. No libxerces-c.a in mingw32-xerces. Static linking makes a lot of sense with mingw. Unlike MSVC, Mingw (by default) links in msvcrt.dll which is *always* present in any Windows installation. Besides, Mingw *always* linkes in *static* libstdc++.a and libgcc.a. Therefore mingw-compiled executables generally have no dll dependenices, which is quite convenient. Moreover, .dlls usually don't make much sense with Mingw: when I distribute my mingw-compiled application, the chances that a user has another mingw-compiled application are quite small which defeats the purpose of using dynamic linking, static linking is usually more appropriate. But Mingw's no-dll-dependenices behavior is broken by the fact that mingw-* packages provide only dll versions of the libraries :-( And it's simply strange to have huge libstdc++.a statically linked into an executable and at the same time depend on tiny little libz1.dll BTW: Although static linking is rarely used in Linux, all *-devel Linux packages still have static versions of libraries...