Re: sort and -lm

[Paul Eggert]

On 2023-10-07 04:42, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> 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

Thanks, I was thinking more along the lines that Bruno suggested, which 
to continue to link to libcrypto, but do it with dlopen/dlsym in 'sort' 
only when need_random is true.

It's not clear to me offhand whether this should be done entirely in 
Coreutils, or whether we should add some Gnulib support to make it 
easier to do this sort of lazier linking.

Also, why doesn't coreutils/configure's ---with-linux-crypto option 
cause 'sort' to use Linux kernel crypto? Is this because the syscall 
overhead would be too high and it's significantly faster to do it in 
user space?

I naively thought that --with-linux-crypto would mean we wouldn't need 
to link to libcrypto. Evidently not.....