Although this allows libX11 to build, I don't think it's built correctly. Things fail to link against libX11, missing some xcb symbols, for example in this test to detect X11: https://gist.github.com/expipiplus1/87201bd0f57325541a365ebf378415cc#file-gistfile1-txt-L5-L36

I had the same problem here:

libx11 depends on libxcb, but the dependency is automatically followed by the linker only with shared libraries. With static linking, -lX11 is not enough, -lxcb is also required. If I understand correctly, things which use pkg-config do work, because pkg-config knows about the additional required flag when passed --static, but things which just probe whether -lx11 works with ./configure just fail.

hmm, is there a good fix for this aside from just patching downstream packages?

I'm not sure, maybe there is a way to merge libX11.a and libxcb.a into only one archive ?

Or maybe we can have a look at what other static-only distros do ?

The output of this derivation is correct, I think it would be quite weird to link libxcb in with libX11, likewise it would be pretty hacky to trick consumers of libX11 to link with libxcb using NIX_LDFLAGS or whatever. sadly I think that this is just a bug in dbus which should be fixed.

Knowing what other distros do would be good, I'll have a quick look.

Is it possible to merge this please as the above problem seems to be one with dbus's build system and not libX11

ping?

Hmm I forgot about this and the file completely changed on master.

On master pkgstStatic.xorg.libX11 builds. The particular change proposed here has been already applied.