Well the core of the issue here is you can't really staticly link against a library that depends on dlopen/dlsym (nss system is built around this).

I mean, you could, but now your staticly linked binary still depends on other dlsym'd code. So whats the point?

(Not trying to make an argument that this is good or bad behaviour)

I understand, but the question then becomes why your library depends on dlopen and why you don't offer an alternative static method as Qt's "plugins" do. Doesn't seem like good design on the part of the NSS devs to me, and probably a poor choice of library on the part of the systemd devs to me. But maybe I'm missing something.

The library that depends on dlopen is glibc.

You can statically link glibc, so I'm pretty sure that's not right...