[Buildroot] Static Library Building - On/Off/Configurable?

All,

Currently many of the packages that are in buildroot have a setting of
--enable-static

This takes extra compile time and seems somewhat unnecessary.  It means
that it is not very configurable. (default on)
What are peoples opinion on using the following:

ifeq ($(BR2_PREFER_STATIC_LIB),y)
	OPT_STATIC = --enable-static
endif

This could be added(not quite like above but similar) to
Makefile.autotools.in, 
I believe that --enable-static is a default parameter to configure
scripts so that should be safe, its just it would mean a central
'switch' to enable static compilation and would make things a lot
simpler.

Dan Laird