Description of problem: There are no static libraries for any of the packages in the gnome2 library set. This includes glib2 I'd be happy even if they were in a separate package such as glib2-static
$ rpm -qpl glib2-devel-2.2.1-1.i386.rpm | grep '\.a' /usr/lib/libglib-2.0.a /usr/lib/libgmodule-2.0.a /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.a /usr/lib/libgthread-2.0.a They are there for glib2. (As of relatively recently.) Above that, it gets to be a huge PITA to do static libraries because of the heavy use of dynamically loaded modules. Plus, Pango and GTK+ require various config files on the system for correct operation, so it doesn't real give you the "distribute binary without library" thing that people usually want static libs for.