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

Zachary Pincus zpincus at stanford.edu
Tue Apr 4 15:38:21 CEST 2006

On Apr 4, 2006, at 1:29 AM, Martin v. Löwis wrote:

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.

Sorry, I meant path in a more metaphoric sense; e.g. on OS X /
Darwin, Python used to go through the code in dynload_next.c every
time it loaded an extension, now under the proposed patch it goes
through dynload_shlib.c.

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.

I'll do this, thanks.

Zach

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list