The problem w/ my patch is the use case where the user specified --disable-shared. In that case, it would build the static libs, but my patch looks explicitly to link against the shared lib: libnettle.dll.a. I explicitly used libnettle.dll.a b/c it built both the static lib and the shared lib and I was unsure which one it would choose to link against (shared or static lib).
I'm not sure I follow you. In the case that shared libaries are built (--enable-shared), the hogweed dll should be dynamically linked with the nettle dll (and linked statically or dynamically to gmp, depending on what's available). I don't see any urgent need to make that configurable, to make it possible to build a shared hogweed dll linked statically with nettle.
That wasn't happening because nettle wasn't being added to the link options (-lnettle) for hogweed. Part of my patch was so it wouldn't link statically against nettle and also b/c it was failing to build because -lnettle wasn't being added at link time.
And in the case only static libraries are built, the various LIBHOGWEED_* variables in the patch are not used, and the static libraries libnettle.a and libhogweed.a are not linked to anything, they're just archives of object files.
I didn't know that. Hopefully it's not a problem then.
I'm more looking at nettle to install pkg-config so others can pick it up.
Sounds reasonable. I'm not going to give it a high priority, but I'll happily take patches, assuming they're not too difficult to understand and maintain.
Sounds reasonable. I don't have time to integrate pkg-config, just thought it might be good to have since a lot of packages are going that route these days, it seems.