You should not need to build static libraries if you pick the oldest RHEL you can find among your customers: the GNU people claim that their libc is backwards-c

You should not need to build static libraries if you pick the oldest RHEL you can find among your customers: the GNU people claim that their libc is backwards-compatible, so your executables and libraries should work with the latest glibc. Building static executables, while convenient, opens your customers to security risk: where rebuilding one shared object library would suffice, now they need entire new binaries. There is a reason why for example Solaris and illumos do not deliver static libraries. That's the reason why, to prevent one from doing exactly what you are doing for the reason I described.