[Help-glpk] Packaging GLPK and shared libraries

[Quentin Spencer]

Hello,
Recent development versions of GNU Octave (www.octave.org) have included 
functions that link to GLPK. I have been involved in packaging Octave 
for Fedora Linux, and I'm working on packaging GLPK since it is now a 
dependency of octave. In searching the archives of this mailing list, 
and looking at the Debian packages of GLPK, I have come to the following 
conclusions (please correct me if I'm wrong):

1. Originally, the GLPK code was not re-entrant, and therefore 
generating a shared library was not an option.
2. This is no longer true of more recent versions of GLPK, so it could 
theoretically be done now.
3. Patches for building shared libraries have been posted to this 
mailing list, but not incorporated into the sources.

I can write scripts to build shared libraries (which is preferred--it 
would be the only one of the many libraries octave depends on that is 
statically linked), but I'm wondering if there is any reason I 
shouldn't. Why is it not supported by default in the sources? Why does 
Debian still build only static libraries?

regards,
Quentin Spencer