Subproject links against dynamic library when building both despite -Ddefault_library=static

Minimal example: https://github.com/Myaamori/meson_mwe/tree/master/default_options_override

This is a simple project that calls a subproject in which default_options: ['default_library=both'] is specified.

Build with:

meson -Ddefault_library=static build
ninja -v -C build default_options_override

Meson will link against the shared version of the library when it should opt for the static.

Python version: 3.8.2 Meson version: 0.56.0

[eli-schwartz]

Right, the general issue here has nothing to do with preferring static or shared and everything to do with subprojects currently being very suboptimal for people wishing to bundle fallback dependencies – this, and several other issues, are due to subprojects being optimized for meta-projects that build and install a collection of projects at once.

This does need fixing, subproject fallback dependencies should default to static and also default to not installing the static library or headers etc.

[CoffeeFlux]

Nothing, and setting the subproject to static will fix the issue with freetype specifically—I don’t particularly care about the shared library when linking statically. The problem is more that I don’t think I should have to go set the default_library manually for every single subproject that is building both by default. A lot of the time I want to link against the shared version, but for release builds on Windows I essentially want to say “link statically or die”. Barring that, “link statically when both options are available” would be an improvement over the status quo.