Lazy loading would have achieved the same thing with less codebase churn. However, the `dlopen()` thing means that the dependencies are then optional as far as

Lazy loading would have achieved the same thing with less codebase churn. However, the `dlopen()` thing means that the dependencies are then optional as far as the packaging system go, and therefore you can run with fewer dependencies installed. Also, lazy loading can be turned off with an environment variable -- we would need a way to indicate that a dependency is optional in order to have something like always-lazy loading for it. There's also "filters" and "auxiliary filters", which can be used to make dependencies optional without having to go to `dlopen()`. However, IIRC filter functionality is very bare-bones or non-workin in the Linux link-editors and ld.so.