[uClibc] uclibc dynamic loader

[Ivan Popov]

Hello,

as a uclibc user which appreciates its beauty
and as a glibc user that heavily depends on an important feature
of its dynamic loader, I have a question.

How hard would be to make a "standalone" dynamic loader for uclibc
which could be run explicitely to load and link a program and libraries,
like glibc does with

ld-linux.so.2 --library-path <path-containing-glibc:otherlibraries> <program>

which is in general the only way to avoid dependency on paths hardcoded
into the executables.

While running programs from a global file systems it is vital to be able
to choose a suitable loader, and/or the library version, without
recompilation.

I am well aware of different tricks used for dynamic linkage management
(don't tell me there is LD_LIBRARY_PATH :) but a thorough analysis and
several years experience show that an explicit dynamic loader is the only
existing solution - compared to partial workarounds, which unavoidably
break somewhere.

I think that such standalone linker (which does not have to be the
same as the internal implicit one - but probably would share most of the code)
should not be hard to implement. It would make uclibc attractive
for usage in the way konvalo.org does, on global file systems.

Thanks for the nice library!
Yours,
--
Ivan