Currently, the cygwinccompiler.py compiler handling in
distutils is invoking the cygwin and mingw compilers
with the -static option.

Logically, this means that the linker should choose to
link to static libraries instead of shared/dynamically
linked libraries.

Current win32 binutils expect import libraries to have
a .dll.a suffix and static libraries to have .a suffix.
If -static is passed, it will skip the .dll.a
libraries. This is pain if one has a tree with both
static and dynamic libraries using this naming
convention, and wish to use the dynamic libraries.

The -static option being passed in distutils is to get
around a bug in old versions of binutils where it would
get confused when it found the DLLs themselves.

The decision to use static or shared libraries is site
or package specific, and should be left to the setup
script or to command line options.