[openssl-project] To use or not use the iconv API, and to use or not use other libraries

[Benjamin Kaduk]

On Thu, Jun 07, 2018 at 05:55:27PM +0200, Andy Polyakov wrote:
> > Regarding general use of other libraries, please think carefully before voting, 'cause this *is* tricky. If you have a look, you will see that we *currently* depend on certain standard libraries, such as, for example, libdl.
> 
> One has to recognize that each dependency has to be justified. Sometimes
> you don't have a choice. For example if you want to talk network on
> Solaris, you have to link with -lsocket -lnsl. It's just part of the
> game. But in cases one has a choice, well, one has a choice to *make*.
> And key question is how do you anchor it. It's only natural to have as
> little dependencies as possible, so question is what would justify extra
> dependency.

Taking off on a bit of a tangent, how much justification did we go
through when adding pthreads as a dependency.  I have not been
following very much (Kurt would know more), but apparently in Debian
there are some issues regarding (statically linked?) applications
and libraries that use libcrypto but do not explicitly link with
-pthread.  "Issues" here being, IIRC, crashes at runtime.

-Ben