No, my problems in the past didn't pertain to shared libraries. I did ask about them long ago but at that point in time, shared was not possible but I'm glad to see that this is changing. I have gotten MXE to work statically in the past but the amount of fails has far outweighed the wins.
The most recent problem I had in the past was that MXE created the executable just fine, yet it was corrupt and would not run. I even had two independent parties test the executable outside of a VM and they confirmed it didn't work either. That was on January 26, 2014 so that is probably the same day when I cloned it.
A large majority of the other issues were the constant problem that one package would fail to build for one reason or another or even fail because the download link may have been down or a bug in the particular submodule unrelated to MXE. There really needs to be some sort of a backup procedure that MXE does that happens when this occurs that ensures just because the main link is down, it should use a mirror or other method(like pulling a known previously built binary or source package right from an MXE github repo similar to what I mentioned above concerning the Travis-CI issue Tim explained above).
I noticed Tim's pull request was closed, but I hope that MXE does incorporate Travis-CI into the workflow and that it is a high priority. Not only does that immediately notify the commiter that they have broken the build, it notifies anyone making a pull request that they will break the build, and others such as myself can actually look at the build history and immediately know that the build is failing before even cloning it just to find out it doesn't build.
I cloned the latest master earlier tonight and will be trying it statically later(Like Tim mentioned, it does exceed 45 minutes, so you must really enjoy your coffee hehe). Here is the output which looks normal so far:
address@hidden:/mydata/mxe$ make -j4 qt5
[check requirements]
[target] i686-pc-mingw32.static with 1 goal from command line
[download] gcc-gmp
[download] mingwrt
[download] w32api
[download] pkgconf
[build] pkgconf
[build] mingwrt
[done] mingwrt
[done] pkgconf
[download] binutils
[build] w32api
[done] w32api
[build] gcc-gmp
[done] gcc-gmp
[download] gcc-isl
[download] gcc-mpfr
[build] gcc-isl
[build] gcc-mpfr
[done] gcc-mpfr
[download] gcc-mpc
[done] gcc-isl
[download] gcc-cloog
[build] binutils
[build] gcc-mpc
[done] gcc-mpc
[build] gcc-cloog
[done] gcc-cloog
[done] binutils
[download] gcc
[build] gcc
[done] gcc
[download] zlib
[download] libgpg_error
[download] libiconv
[build] gmp
[build] zlib
[done] zlib
[download] pcre
[build] libgpg_error
[done] libgpg_error
[download] libpng
[build] pcre
[build] libiconv
[build] libpng
[done] pcre
[download] jpeg
[build] jpeg
[done] libpng
[download] sqlite
[done] jpeg
[download] bzip2
[build] sqlite
[build] bzip2
[done] libiconv
[download] expat
[done] bzip2
[download] icu4c
[build] expat
[done] expat
[download] xz
[build] xz
[done] sqlite
[download] libgcrypt
[done] xz
[download] gettext
[build] libgcrypt
[done] libgcrypt
[download] freetype
[build] freetype
[done] freetype
[download] dbus
[build] dbus
[build] icu4c
[done] dbus
[download] tiff
[done] gmp
[download] openssl
[build] gettext
[build] tiff
[build] openssl
[done] tiff
[download] nettle
[done] gettext
[download] fontconfig
[build] nettle
[build] fontconfig
[done] nettle
[download] lcms
[build] lcms
[done] fontconfig
[download] gnutls
[done] lcms
[download] libmng
[done] icu4c
[build] libmng
[build] gnutls
[done] libmng
[done] gnutls
[download] freetds
[done] openssl
[download] postgresql
[build] freetds
[done] freetds
[build] postgresql
[done] postgresql
[download] qtbase
[build] qtbase
[done] qtbase
[download] qtsvg
[download] qtactiveqt
[download] qtxmlpatterns
[download] qtimageformats
[build] qtactiveqt
[build] qtimageformats
[build] qtxmlpatterns
[build] qtsvg
[done] qtimageformats
[download] qtmultimedia
[done] qtsvg
[download] qtscript
[build] qtmultimedia
[done] qtactiveqt
[download] qtsensors
[build] qtsensors
[build] qtscript
[done] qtsensors
[download] qtserialport
[build] qtserialport
[done] qtserialport
[download] qtservice
[build] qtservice
[done] qtservice
[done] qtmultimedia
[done] qtxmlpatterns
[download] qtdeclarative
[done] qtscript
[no-build] qtdeclarative
[download] qtgraphicaleffects
[download] qtconnectivity
[download] qttools
[download] qtlocation
[build] qtconnectivity
[done] qtconnectivity
[download] qtquickcontrols
[build] qtquickcontrols
[done] qtquickcontrols
[download] qtwinextras
[build] qtlocation
[no-build] qtwinextras
[done] qtlocation
[build] qttools
[build] qtgraphicaleffects
[done] qtgraphicaleffects
[done] qttools
[download] qtquick1
[download] qttranslations
[build] qttranslations
[done] qttranslations
[build] qtquick1
[done] qtquick1
[download] qtwebkit
[no-build] qtwebkit
[no-build] qt5