Shared libraries - dependencies or dlopen

[John Hedges <john@drystone.co.uk>]

Hello list

I need to make a design decision an I wonder if I might get some
feedback here.

I'm a new maintainer, currently working on splay, an mp3 decoder. I've
added support for native ALSA and used dlopen to get at the ALSA
library. This means that the package doesn't need to depend on ALSA
being installed - it otherwise defaults to using OSS. I'm also
considering adding support for ogg files and playback using the JACK
interface and was considering using the same method for similarly
satisfying these dependencies at runtime using dlopen.

I think ALSA is default for 2.6 kernels so depending on ALSA is not a
great problem, but I was tring to avoid having to drag in everything
else if all you want to do is play mp3s on a normal soundcard.

Is this a sensible thing to be doing or would it be better to make splay
depend on the extra packages? Perhaps plugins is a good way to go, but I
wonder if this might over-complicate a simple command-line player.

Any guidance would be appreciated.

Cheers

John