[Python-Dev] Python modules should link to libpython (original) (raw)

Ronald Oussoren ronaldoussoren at mac.com
Wed Feb 8 19:33:31 CET 2006

On 8-feb-2006, at 16:47, Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro wrote:

gjc:/usr/lib/python2.4/lib-dynload$ ldd itertools.so libpthread.so.0 => /lib/libpthread.so.0 (0x00002aaaaabcc000) libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x00002aaaaace2000) /lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x0000555555554000) gjc:/usr/lib/python2.4/lib-dynload$

It seems that Python C extension modules are not linking explicitly to libpython. Yet, they explicitly reference symbols defined in libpython. When libpython is loaded in a global scope all is fine. However, when libpython is dlopen()ed with the RTLDLOCAL flag, python C extensions always get undefined symbols. This problem happened recently with the nautilus-python package, which installs an extension for the Nautilus file manager that allows extensions in Python. For performance reasons, it now opens extensions with RTLDLOCAL flag, thus breaking python extensions. Any thoughts? Should I go ahead and open a bug report (maybe with patch), or is this controversial?

I don't know about Linux, but on OSX we don't link with libpython (or Python.framework) on purpose: this allows you to share extensions
between several builds of the same version of Python. If you do link with
libpython and extension that was compiled by a python installed at a different
location will result in having two copies of libpython in memory, only one of
which is initialized. You end up with very interesting crashes.

Ronald

-- Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro <gjc at inescporto.pt> <gustavo at users.sourceforge.net> The universe is always one step beyond logic.

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