[systemd-devel] feature request: dlopen

[Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek]

On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 11:58:25PM +0000, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 9:10 AM, Tobias Hunger <tobias.hunger at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi Luke,
> >
> > I am mostly a lurker on the systemd mailing list, so my opinion does
> > not carry weight in this community.
> >
> > On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 9:24 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton
> > <lkcl at lkcl.net> wrote:> so i'm not going to "protest" - i'm going to
> > try a different approach.
> >> i'd like you to look at this list of debian packages that are
> >> dependent on libsystemd0:
> >> http://lkcl.net/reports/removing_systemd_from_debian/list_of_libsystemd0_dependent_packages.txt
> >
> > I understood most of these dependencies to be indirect: Packages that
> > depend on other packages that in turn depend on libsystemd. Is that
> > correct?
> 
>  that's right.  so, what that means is that the actual number of
> packages which would need to be converted to dynamic loading is
> actually very small (about 100), and the remaining 4,483 would be fine
> (not need any work done on them at all).
> 
> 
> > On the other hand the library is tiny and basically falls back to
> > being a no-op in the case where systemd is not PID1, so it does not
> > hurt non-systemd systems to have this library in any way.
> 
>  ...except that its introduction (usually --with-libsystemd) in those
> 100 (or so) packages has been done in a mutually-exclusive,
> hard-compile-time switch that *excludes* the possibility of dynamic
> (runtime) decision-making.
I think this is the crux of the matter. Please accept the fact that
this compile time switch does not preclude runtime decision making at
all. When not running under systemd, calls into libsystemd degrade
into silent noops. So they only "cost" that is an extra unused 600kb
library, which is completely insignificant.

Zbyszek