The goal is to use old glibc so that it can reach more audience (in
particular, RHEL and CentOS users).
Also, we don't compress the executable (using UPX) so that it can be
inspected with ldd. Bonus: no more decompression overhead, faster
startup.
http://code.google.com/p/phantomjs/issues/detail?id=963
Previously, a static build would produce three separate files:
QtWebKit.a, libjscore.a and libwebcore.a. These seem to have
dependencies on each other and this caused the build errors on Linux.
This change means that the sources of jscore and webcore are both built
directly into the QtWebKit.a target. libjscore.a and libwebcore.a are no
longer built. It is then possible to create a static binary on Linux.
http://code.google.com/p/phantomjs/issues/detail?id=413
Ariya Hidayat