This is not a bug with PCRE, nor with Libtool.
The Gentoo bug report clearly indicates an attempt to build a shared PCRE
module (pcre.so) using a static archive library (/usr/lib64/libpcre.a).
Static libraries are usually non-PIC, so of course this fails.
Adding -fPIC makes the problem go away because the resulting libpcre.a
contains PIC objects, which can then be assembled into an .so. If you
wanted a pcre.so that did not depend on libpcre.so, then this would be the
correct course of action.
(Typically, you wouldn't do CFLAGS=-fPIC in that case, because that is
GCC-specific. Instead, you would pass --with-pic [and maybe
--disable-shared] to the PCRE configure script.)
What you probably want, however, is for pcre.so to be dynamically linked to
libpcre.so. For some reason or another, this is not happening when the
makefile builds pcre.so. That, right there, is the bug.
--Daniel
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