finding out about (system) dependencies

[Mark Reinhold]

> Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2007 10:41:15 -0500
> From: tom.marble at sun.com

> Matthias Klose wrote:
>> A whole bunch of system libraries are tried to load using dlopen, instead of
>> linking against these libraries. Is this a leftover windowism, or expected
>> behaviour? [...]
> 
> I suspect this has been done, among other reasons, to reduce
> startup time and memory footprint.

There are also cases where it's done in order to cope with the potential
absence of certain libraries on some systems.

>> so I assume these dependencies have to be managed manually as long as the
>> libraries are not linked against the system libraries?
> 
> Probably.  And to the extent we can collaborate between the distros
> (e.g. Debian, Fedora, Gentoo...) system library package names and
> dependency graphs that would be fantastic.

Agreed.  It's also be interesting, however, to do an audit of all the
dlopen calls in the code to see how many are actually necessary these
days.

- Mark