[Python-Dev] Use dlopen() on Darwin/OS X to load extensions? (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Tue Apr 4 08:29:44 CEST 2006

Zachary Pincus wrote:

Specifically, this patch would change a core python code path.

Why do you think so? I believe Python always passes absolute paths to dlopen, so any path resolution dlopen might do should be irrelevant. If you can get dlopen to look at directories outside sys.path, that would be a serious problem. You can use ktrace to find out what places it looks at.

But it would be good to have a specific benchmark to know nothing will break. I personally sort of feel that if dlopen() works once or twice, it will probably always work, but there are those who probably understand better the failure modes of opening shared libs as python extensions, and could suggest some good things to test.

Running the test suite should already exercise this code a lot. You should run the test suite both in "working copy" mode, and in "make install" mode; if you know how to produce a Mac installer, testing it in such an installer ("framework mode"?) could also be done.

Regards, Martin

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