*You are the consumer.* You are consuming it in foo. Are you building some straw man consumer who might want to delve into my build and rearrange my libraries with no work at all? You can even do that if you want. Remove the linkstatic line from qux. Now it has two outputs: `libqux.a` (default) and a `libqux.so` (implicit). If you want to ship both of them in a release artifact, you can. If you want to mark some binaries `linkstatic = True` and statically link them you can. If you want to dyanmically link some binaries, you can do that too.

I was demonstrating that you can force some libraries to be only static and still partially link some things static and some dyanmic. If you want to get really into the weeds, you could even affect the link line and individually pick dependencies in a custom rule (that is fully compatible with the rest of the bazel tooling). Almost nobody ever needs to do that, but maybe you want to make only every other dependency dynamic to satisfy some weird slide in a talk.

This is just false. Bazel creates both static and dynamic libs by default for every cc_library. The default is to link static, but you can control this on a per-binary basis. You don't need parallel trees of targets or even to write custom rules to access the non-default output groups that contain the shared library. This all just works out of the box.