The attached patch defines SHLIBEXT and PICSUFFIX to be "a", not "po" on AIX, which is the most common one. ("so" is also allowed for shared libs but this seems to be less common)
Created attachment 1873 [details] patch for configure.in
*** Bug 3102 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Created attachment 1967 [details] patch to correct pic extension this patch now just corrects PICSUFFIX, sets it to "o". On AIX shlibs are mostly archived in .a archives but that is not mandatory. We should stay with .so and not mess around with putting them into .a files for now.
finally we now set pic extension to po.o