Hello,
I am using Slackware64-13.37. Recently I had a number of issues compiling software, all of which turned out to to be a result of that the dependencies are built only as shared libraries, while the application being compiled only needs static libraries. As I am not a programmer, please excuse my ignorance, but I would like to ask, is there a way (probably a general) to tell an application that is being compiled to search for shared libraries only?

If your referring to your program grads (that was it?) that you ended up with a special package to cover it's dependencies then the dependencies and the application were probably setup to be statically linked by default as you then don't need to package the dependencies to enable the program to work.

This is similar to how Eric (AlienBob) packages his vlc build as it means he distributes one package instead of about 20 (number 20 pulled out of thin air).

Typically when compiling libraries you have the option of --disable-static & --enable-shared to tell configure what you want (you can have both if you want or only one)

When you compile your application it may also have options to enable the libraries to be linked either way but they must exist in the correct form to be used in a particular way.

In Slackware most libraries are configured with --disable-static --enable-shared so there is no option for applications to be statically linked against them.

Thank You very much for Your reply. This is exactly what interests me, as I am using Slackware that only ships shared libraries, is it possible to tell
an application I am compiling to look for shared instead of static libraries for its dependencies. How could I recognise that an application has an option to
be configured to use shared libraries? --enable-shared and --enable-static refer to whether to produce the respective libraries for the current package, but
which parameters usually tell the application to look for shared or static dependencies?

if you issue "configure --help" it will output supported switches for that program/library, sometimes you may need to pipe it through less "configure --help | less" (this is usually larger projects)