I have two outstanding patches against grep: #7017 (dlopen PCRE) & #6107 (Patch to add transparent decompression). Both require dynamic run-time linking (indeed, #6107 is purely to add it).
They have been stuck for some years because I have been unable to get the grep maintainers to tell me how they'd like to do dynamic linking (see the inconsistent comments to #7017). Both patches address items on the TODO list. Since the maintainers have not found the time to address this problem, maybe it's not considered worth the effort to solve? That is not an unreasonable position to take: dlopening is really a solution to a problem that some GNU distributions have (namely, shipping grep in /bin and libpcre/libz in /usr/lib), not a problem that grep itself has. A form of patch #7017 has already been accepted by Debian, while Fedora doesn't have the problem as they ship libpcre in /lib. Hence, I suggest: 1. Remove run-time linking items from the TODO list. 2. Reject and close patch #7017. 3. I rewrite patch #6107 in a form that links the relevant compression libraries normally, and provide a configure option to enable/disable the feature. This recognises what seems to be the unexpressed consensus, namely that sorting out run-time linking is more trouble than it's worth, while unblocking a useful patch (transparent decompression) whose implementation and UI design was already tentatively agreed on some years ago. -- http://rrt.sc3d.org
