On Oct 3, 2005, at 10:56 AM, Stephen Langer wrote:
Is it possible to create libBase portably with distutils? It's possible to do it on Linux by subclassing build_ext.build_ext and explicitly using self.compiler.compile() and self.compiler.link_shared_lib() to build the shared library before calling build_ext.build_ext.build_extensions(). But the same thing on Mac OS X only creates libBase.so, whereas I need it to create libBase.dylib.
I don't know if this is possible, although I'd guess it is not.
That's too bad. Is there a reason for it? I'd volunteer to work on modifying distutils so that it can build a .dylib, but I am not an expert on library formats. I don't really know the difference between a .so and a .dylib, except that one of them works and the other doesn't. Can someone point me in the direction of a good reference on the topic?
The most portable way is to not build a libBase at all. Build a Python extension that has all the functionality from libBase available in it as a data structure with function pointers, and get a reference to that from everything that depends on libBase functionality. Take a look at what Numeric's C API does, for example. -bob