Question about static linking with librdkafka by default

[akhmatov-s]

Hello, I'm the maintainer of kcat package for FreeBSD and noticed this change while updating to 1.7.0: f6b620708a6290246f36f88cf1e45f85db66fa2c Static linking will require bumping package version for kcat with every librdkafka update, which leads to some overhead for maintaining the package. I'd prefer to stick to dynamic linking and I think that similar problems could arise on any other package management systems for different linux distros.

• What's the rationale behind this change?
• Is it possible to link librdkafka dynamically via configure options? I couldn't find such options.
• Could you consider implementing configure options to choose between static/dynamic linking? (Unfortunately I'm not familiar with mklove to propose pull request)

[edenhill]

The reason was to avoid bootstrap.sh to pick up a system installed version of librdkafka. I think we'll want to add an --enable-static option to configure to try static linking first.