Use libtool to build static archives when --with-static-prpls is passed to configure. Does anyone know why we weren't using libtool before? We were building old-fashioned .a files. But libtool archives (.la) can contain either static or shared libraries. I found it a lot easier to get static prpl compilation working after making this change (that is to say, it worked). Without this I got this error, which is probably fixable, but consistently using libtool seems like it makes things easier: *** Warning: Linking the shared library libpurple.la against the *** static library ../libpurple/protocols/msn/libmsn.a is not portable! /usr/bin/ld: ../libpurple/protocols/msn/libmsn.a(libmsn_a-msn.o): relocation R_X86_64_32 against `a local symbol' can not be used when making a shared object; recompile with -fPIC ../libpurple/protocols/msn/libmsn.a: could not read symbols: Bad value collect2: ld returned 1 exit status