It's 2018... require shared libraries and dynamic linking to build Octave?

[John W. Eaton]

To be used effectively, Octave already requires shared libraries and 
dynamic linking.  Is there any reason to not require those features in 
order to build Octave?  Doing that would allow some simplification of 
the build system and I don't know of any modern systems on which we can 
build Octave that do not have these features.

jwe