Merged, with a small bugfix for the patch ("=?" => "?="). Thanks again!

Thanks, glad to help.

Thanks for the patch! Ideally we'd like to touch the VAL code as litte as
possible (as it's "upstream" code from KCL that we only include for
convenience), but this looks like a simple and reasonable change. Besides, I
think this part of the Makefile was already changed by us anyway.

I'll merge this unless I hear complaints from anyone in the next day or so.

I see that static linking is enabled by default on Linux platforms and disabled
on OSX, (presumably as a consequence of
http://issues.fast-downward.org/issue313).  I see also that you've allowed
static linking to be disabled on other platforms - but unfortunately the flag
the documentation suggests is unfortunately not respected by the VAL Makefile. 
I'd propose the following simple patch, or something like it, as attached inline.

Note I'm coming to this "from cold" with no knowledge of the software (I'm just
working on building it locally for our users) so please accept my apologies for
any faulty assumptions.

Hope that helps,

Graham

-----

diff -r 6c35c7258228 src/VAL/Makefile
--- a/src/VAL/Makefile  Fri Jun 05 11:52:18 2015 +0200
+++ b/src/VAL/Makefile  Wed Jun 17 16:24:36 2015 +0100
@@ -31,6 +31,11 @@
 
 MYCODEDIR := .
 
+## Set DOWNWARD_LINK_RELEASE_STATICALLY to 0 or 1 (default) to
+## disable/enable static linking of the executable in release mode.
+## On OS X, this is unsupported and will be silently disabled.
+DOWNWARD_LINK_RELEASE_STATICALLY =? 1
+
 OS = auto
 ## We link statically by default, but not on OS X.
 ## The OS can either be auto-detected (default) or
@@ -58,7 +63,7 @@
 ## Disable static linking on OS X.
 LINK_STATICALLY = 0
 else
-LINK_STATICALLY = 1
+LINK_STATICALLY = ${DOWNWARD_LINK_RELEASE_STATICALLY}
 endif
 
 # Directories to search for header files