I went and tried to do a trial updating of the package to 4.0.1. Still monkeying around with that.
It seems that the cmake build scripts have the option -DINSTALL_LIB=ON to generate a library, but it generates a *static* libtransmisison.a, and there is no option to generate a dynamic/shared libtransmission.so. This would appear to be a deliberate upstream decision, which we would normally defer to. On the other hand, upstream also makes the deliberate decision to add crazy buggy git pre-commit hooks when you build the package. configure_file("${CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR}/extras/pre-commit" "${TR_GIT_ROOT}/.git/hooks/pre-commit" COPYONLY)