Thanks for your suggestions; I am making progress on getting a static build working.
I have a problem with make distcheck, with libcharset, where it seems that a relative path is not adjusted correctly for the extra subdirectory level:
test -d '../recode-3.7.14/libiconv'/libcharset || mkdir '../recode-3.7.14/libiconv'/libcharset; cd libcharset && make distdir distdir='../recode-3.7.14/libiconv'/libcharset
make[4]: Entering directory '/home/rrt/.local/var/repo/recode-static-iconv/libiconv/libcharset'
for file in README DEPENDENCIES INSTALL.windows HACKING INTEGRATE AUTHORS NEWS ChangeLog Makefile.devel
configure.ac Makefile.in include/export.h include/
libcharset.h.in include/
localcharset.h.in tools/README tools/all-charsets tools/all-charsets-X11 tools/all-locales tools/locale_charmap tools/locale_charset.c tools/locale_codeset.c tools/locale_monthnames.c tools/locale_x11encoding.c tools/aix-3.2.5 tools/aix-4.1.5 tools/aix-4.2.0 tools/aix-4.3.2 tools/beos-5 tools/cygwin-1.7.2 tools/darwin-6.8 tools/darwin-7.5 tools/darwin-9.5 tools/freebsd-3.3 tools/glibc-2.1.3 tools/glibc-2.1.90 tools/glibc-2.2 tools/glibc-2.2-XF86-3.3.6 tools/glibc-2.2-XF86-4.0.1f tools/hpux-10.01 tools/hpux-10.20 tools/hpux-11.00 tools/irix-6.5 tools/netbsd-3.0 tools/openbsd-4.1 tools/osf1-4.0a tools/osf1-4.0d tools/osf1-5.1 tools/solaris-2.4 tools/solaris-2.5.1 tools/solaris-2.6 tools/solaris-2.6-cjk tools/solaris-2.7 tools/sunos-4.1.4 tools/win32 COPYING.LIB build-aux/ltmain.sh m4/libtool.m4 m4/lt~obsolete.m4 m4/ltoptions.m4 m4/ltsugar.m4 m4/ltversion.m4 INSTALL.generic build-aux/config.guess build-aux/config.libpath build-aux/config.sub build-aux/install-sh build-aux/libtool-reloc build-aux/mkinstalldirs m4/codeset.m4 m4/fcntl-o.m4 m4/visibility.m4 autoconf/aclocal.m4 configure
config.h.in include/
libcharset.h.build.in include/
localcharset.h.build.in ; do \
if test -f $file; then dir='.'; else dir='.'; fi; \
destdir=`echo '../recode-3.7.14/libiconv/libcharset'/$file | sed -e 's|//*[^/]*$||'`; \
test -d "$destdir" || mkdir "$destdir"; \
cp -p "$dir/$file" '../recode-3.7.14/libiconv/libcharset'/$file || exit 1; \
done
mkdir: cannot create directory ‘../recode-3.7.14/libiconv/libcharset’: No such file or directory
cp: cannot create regular file '../recode-3.7.14/libiconv/libcharset/README': No such file or directory