Cabal 3.8 asks pkg-config for linker options for both dynamic and static linking.

See haskell/cabal@bf32602

For some derivations (glib for instance) pkg-config can fail when --static is passed. This might be because the library only has dynamic libraries. The error looks like this:

Package libpcre was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `libpcre.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
Package 'libpcre', required by 'glib-2.0', not found

This could be fixed if there was lazier failure in Cabal. It could store the message instead of the options and print it when anyone tried to use them.