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.
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? If so, how about this idea instead? Let's improve the diagnostics of the dynamic linker. That would improve this issue for all programs, not just for 'who'. And it would mean we needn't worry about this sort of thing for coreutils, either for libsystemd or for other dynamically linked libraries that are essential for default operation.
