Is the only reason to do this to shave off 100kb?

To be clear, "half closure size" is nice, but means something very different at 200kb and 200mb. Adding flags makes the feature discoverability of most expressions much more poor in my experience because now I have to go ruffle through the source code, and have to start adding overrides to everything to make the changes apply. That's not the end of the world but it is what it is.

Frankly, I don't think this is actually important at all -- and is mostly an annoying obstacle in the way of using lmdb statically in my cases. Anyone who simply passes -llmdb should (IIRC) get the dynamically linked version. Other users can link statically by referencing liblmdb.a directly (e.g. LMDB_LIB_DIR=${lmdb.lib} in your expression and go from there).

(I'm not willing to give a strong -1 on this because it isn't that important, and I could live with this being merged. But it is quite annoying, IMO.)

:-) it's right that 100KB is very little. I got a bit carried away by the general concept, thinking about its applicability to a wider range of libraries... so this is more of a guinea pig to me.

The complications might depend on your build system... when nix passes only one library version, there's only one way to link and that's what usage through pkg-config will do, I think. When you have both, you have to choose somehow inside the build system.

I wonder if the divison could make more sense in future when pkgsStatic might be adding -flto, though perhaps that would be sufficiently useful even for building dynamic libs.

Anyway, I don't think this particular PR should be merged now if that would cause (you) practical complications. (Which is exactly why I created the PR.)

On second thought it might just be better to vendor lmdb's code myself honestly for my use case. Will come back to this thought shortly....

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Reopen and rebase if there's still interest