On Mon, 13 Jul 2026 at 19:42, Paul Eggert <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 7/13/26 03:20, Luca Boccassi wrote: > > coreutils_already_ uses dlopen (correctly!) to optionally load > > openssl for an optional feature in sort: > > Sure, but that's a different case. It is designed for improving > performance in the normal case and for causing link failure to occur > only for unusual cases, whereas the proposed change is for a much bigger > deal: it's for default functionality. Default functionality is why > programs ordinarily link dynamically before 'main' starts up.
That may be the case, but the end result is the same: dlopen is used. The assertion you made was: > And I am dubious about the dlopen business in > general; it's not needed for the other libraries coreutils dynamically > link to, and why is libsystemd special? I simply pointed out this assertion is false: dlopen _is_ needed for another library in coreutils. The reason for which it was added is irrelevant to my point. > > It just crashes on startup, and you > > can't even run --help or so, which is very much not what we want. > > So the main point of the proposed change is to improve diagnostics, > right? No. The point is to make it possible to install the coreutils package without installing the libselinux1 package. There are only two available options for that purpose: delete all the selinux-related code and remove the dependency entirely, or make it runtime-optional like openssl already is.
