Crazy idea for easy (lazy) dlopen replacement

[Hans de Goede]

Hi,

As we all know it would be nice if more programs would runtime 
conditionally support some of there features, think for example mp3 support.

The traditional way todo this is dlopen and friends, but that is a bit 
of a pain, so I had this crazy idea why not (ab)use the RTLD_LAZY 
feature also done by ld.so ?

If we could add a way to tell ld.so that a certain library is optional, 
and then add a libc function call to ask if such an optional library was 
  found, then all we need todo is make sure no symbols of said library 
are used when it is not found, when we do not use any such symbols, the 
RTLD_LAZY feature basicly means that we do not need the library. Since 
many programs for for example image and sound formats usualy have only 
one code path to filter out for a certain image / sound format so if 
this dirty hack / feature of optional libraries could be added then
supporting optional libs would be easy.

Regards,

Hans

p.s.

I'll be offline for 2 weeks since I will be away from work for 2 weeks 
and I currently do not have internet access at home because I just 
moved. SO don't expect any replies to replies from me soon.