Arthur Reutenauer wrote:
i hate that since for users there are many ways to screw that up
I concurr. And I think dynamic linking has never been the trend in the TeX world anyway (apart from XeTeX, which is yet another story); for example I have never seen a libkpathsea.so, but only static libraries which are sometimes installed in $SELFAUTOPARENT/lib or so (but never used, I guess). Even for things like ttf2tfm which are closely related to freetype or to some other "big" library, the binaries seem to be statically linked.
FYI: This bit of code in luatex is not about actually linking a library dynamically vs. statically, but loading the whole library runtime, like perl and ruby do with some of the larger extensions (e.g. Tk.so) Since we all seem to dislike the idea, I'll remove support for that soon. Greetings, Taco