Missing .la files

[Ken Brown]

I know there has been a change in cygport so that by default, .la files 
are no longer shipped.  But the .la files for fontconfig, expat, and 
freetype are needed for the Cygwin build of xetex.exe for the native TeX 
Live distribution.  This is a static build.  (Native TeX Live uses 
static builds to reduce library dependencies.)

The .la files are present in the x86 distro but not the x86_64 distro. 
Without the .la files, libtool produces a link command line

   g++ ... -o xetex.exe ... -lfontconfig -lexpat -lfreetype ...,

resulting in error messages like

/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-pc-cygwin/4.8.2/../../../../x86_64-pc-cygwin/bin/ld: 
cannot find -lfontconfig

With the .la files present, the command line becomes

   g++ ... -o xetex.exe ...  /usr/lib/libfontconfig.dll.a 
/usr/lib/libexpat.dll.a /usr/lib/libfreetype.dll.a ...

A workaround is to copy the .la files from my x86 installation to my 
x86_64 distro.  Is there a different way I should be dealing with this? 
  If not, can the .la files for those three libraries be added to the 
x86_64 distro?

Thanks.

Ken