Shared objects as plugins

When building shared objects for plugin usage, like the case for NSS I noted, PAM plugins or extensions for languages like Ruby, Python, Perl, Java… you don’t need static libraries at all, so a shared object is enough!

While some of those system do support statically linking engine and plugins in an application, this rarely works out as intended; for instance FreeBSD (used to?) support statically linked PAM, but that worked only for the default modules, and if you configured your service authentication chain to use non-default modules you have a non-working setup. So the net result is definitely against having to support statically-linked PAM, or any other statically linked system.

Since you cannot link this stuff statically in, you can easily see that there is no need to install (nor build!) the static archive version of those things; this is usually done properly by both custom-tailored build system (as upstream likely tries to minimise the effort) and by the language-specific buildsystems...

rest here