I have been trying to produce a statically linked "single binary" version of my game for windows. I want to link with sdl, sdl_image and sdl_mixer which in turn pull in a few support libraries. Unfortunately I haven't found a way to get them all to compile and link using cygwin/mingw/gcc. As far as I can tell all existing public versions are only shared libraries / dlls.
Please note that I'm not talking about licencing here. The source will be open thus the GPL/LGPLness of sdl is not relevant.
That's because the SDL libs are under the LGPL-license.
If you want to static link the libs (you can do that if your recompile them. It needs some hacking into the makefiles though) you have to place your game under some compatible open source license as well.
The SDL-libs come as shared libraries because most programs that use them are closed source. The binary distribution comes in a form that most people need.
Via this SDL mailing list post it seems that the sdl development tools ship with a sdl-config script that you can use with the --static-libs flag to determine what linker flags you need to use.
When compiling your project, you need to make just a couple changes to your makefile.
sdl-config --libs, use sdl-config --static-libssdl-config --static-libs with -Wl,-Bstatic and -Wl,-Bdynamic. This tells GCC to force static linking, but only for the libraries specified between them.If your makefile currently looks like:
SDLLIBS=`sdl-config --libs`
Change it to:
SDLLIBS=-Wl,-Bstatic `sdl-config --static-libs` -Wl,-Bdynamic
These are actually the same things you should do on Unix-like systems, but it usually doesn't cause as many errors on Unix-likes if you use the simpler -static flag to GCC, like it does on Windows.
On my system (Ubuntu) I have to use the following flags:
-Wl,Bstatic -lSDL_image `sdl-config --libs` -lpng12 -lz -ltiff -ljpeg -lasound -laudio -lesd -Wl,-Bdynamic `directfb-config --libs` -lpulse-simple -lcaca -laa -ldl
That links SDL, SDL_image, and many of their dependencies as static. libdl you never want static, so making a fully-static binary that uses SDL_image is a poor idea. pulse,caca,aa, and directfb can probably be made static. I haven't got far enough to figure them out yet.