Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> writes:
If you find that a "good" redesign requires a shared libpython, then so be it - but I'm still quite fond of the "single executable" appraoch, so preserving that would be even better.
Why? I thought there was serious work underway to make libpython.so a reality on Linux?
It already is, with --enable-shared. However, I still think that people creating --enable-shared installations are misguided: You gain nothing (IMO), and you lose a number of benefits: - starting python will always require the dynamic linker to search for the library, after the system already searched for the executable. This will cause a number of extra stat calls. Together with the need to produce PIC code, this will slow down Python. - If Python is installed into a non-standard location (such as /usr/local on Solaris), you will need additional trickery to find the shared library. Even though the default installation achieves this trickery with a -R option, the resulting binary is not relocatable anymore to a different directory (or, the python binary, but libpython2.3.so isn't) Regards, Martin