Re: sort and -lm

[Pádraig Brady]

On 07/10/2023 04:38, Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 2023-10-06 19:33, Bruno Haible wrote:
> > Why would that be a problem? The average run time of a 'sort' invocation
> > is long enough that an additional link dependency to libm shouldn't matter.
>
> We've avoided -lm in the past, I think more to avoid the dependency.
>
> > If you really want to minimize the startup time, you could load the libcrypto,
> > needed for the option '--random', using dlopen() ? I wouldn't advocate it as
> > a solution on all platforms, since libltdl surely has its own set of
> > portability problems. But guarded by a '#ifdef __GLIBC__', why not?
>
> Yes, that sounds like it might be a win too. I hadn't noticed the
> dependency on libcrypto (and libz).

FYI.

coreutils auto links with libcrypto >=3 since it's GPL compat,
and quite a bit faster than the fallback routines.
libz is a transitive dependency of libcrypto.

The auto linking is globally controlled with the --with-openssl
cofigure option, but you could build sort (and md5sum)
without that dependency with:

  ./configure ac_cv_lib_crypto_MD5=no

cheers,
Pádraig