Re: [PATCH] readutmp: load libsystemd with dlopen instead of linking

Luca Boccassi wrote:
> > I see two ways to achieve that:
> >
> >   a) Minimal environments could be created with no 'who', 'users', 'pinky'
> >      programs. (For instance, the chroot environment creation routine
> >      could skip over these three programs. Or the distro could split the
> >      'coreutils' package into 'coreutils-minimal' and 'coreutils-global'
> >      packages; 'who', 'users', 'pinky' would be contained in the latter.
> >
> >   b) Just add the 'who', 'users', 'pinky' program to the minimal environment,
> >      without libsystemd.so. Then any invocation of 'who', 'users', 'pinky'
> >      will automatically fail, due to the missing shared library.
> >
> > I find either of these two approaches preferable to what you propose.
> 
> Neither of these work in practice in major and important distros like
> Ubuntu and Fedora.

I understand that distros would not like approach (a).

But approach (b), why not?

> The point is that there is a single build,
> producing a single package, called coreutils, that provides the same
> binaries for all use cases.

Yes, I understand this point. IIRC, Debian has different binaries
in the bootloader than in the full system, and I can see why not all
distros would like to do the same thing.

> I'll send a new version that goes back to failing hard if the library
> is missing

Thanks.

> - the fallback was added following a review on github.

For changes to Gnulib, this mailing list is what matters. Not GitHub.

Bruno