I am having this same problem. Looking at the configure script it looks like it prefers to use:
pkg-config sdl —static to get the static linker flags, rather than: sdl-config —static-libs The former returns an empty string; the latter returns the correct library list. If it had used the latter it would work properly. There is a note in the configure effect suggesting that pig-config is preferred, but I’m not sure why that is…