Lazy run-time linking of PCRE and similar

[Reuben Thomas]

I wrote to the list not long ago to express an interest in implementing this 
feature (which is in the TODO list).

I already have a working Debian-specific patch, which I now need to 
generalise. The obvious way to do this is to use libtool's libltdl, but grep 
doesn't currently seem to use libtool. Would this be acceptable? I'd need to 
add libtool support to configure.ac, and it would probably be best to add 
libltdl to the grep repository, so that grep doesn't depend on either its 
presence or on a particular version being installed on users' systems.

My patch currently uses libdl, so I could also simply detect that in 
configure.ac and use it if available, but that would lose support for HP-UX 
and Windows, among others.

What would the developers prefer? In particular, I use up-to-date autotools, 
so it would be useful to know whether I should support older-than-current 
versions.

(By the way, I have signed an FSF copyright assignment for grep.)

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