Hi, I am one of the authors of the python binding for the OpenOffice' component model UNO( see http://www.openoffice.org and http://www.budischewski.com/pyuno/python-bridge.html). First of all, let me say, that is real fun to work with python C API and its documentation. However, there are still some open questions, for which I haven't found an answer in the documentation. 1) I can't find an API call to get to know, whether the current thread has the global interpreter lock or not. ( A recursive lock would also help). Some background: UNO objects are also reference counted, when they get destructed, they may need to PY_DECREF python references. However, the OpenOffice object's dtor might either be called with or without global interpreter lock. I currently workaround this by delegating the PY_DECREF to a new thread, however, which has the defined state (it does not have the lock, so it must acquire it), but this is quite inefficient. 2) I would like to hook into the python import mechanism in order to introduce new classes. I currently do this by replacing the __builtin__.__dict__["__import__"] with my own version, which delegates to the original function and in case of failure tries to lookup a UNO type. This allows e.g. by writing from com.sun.star.uno import XComponent to elegantly create such UNO types. However, I think, the replace-__import__-function is quite a nasty solution, I would rather like to have an API for this. Is there an API I have overlooked (or is it planned to have something like that ? ). 3) The Python-UNO bridge can be used within the python process or within the office process itself ( so called UNO components). For the latter, the binding initializes python by calling Py_Initialize(). As you might know, OpenOffice.org comes as a binary (not in source) even on unix platforms. But I don't want to decide at buildtime, which Python version the user should use (and actually I don't want to ship python), instead I want to reuse a python version, which already exists on the system. But currently, the python unix buildprocess does not create a shared library, only a static lib (while on windows a shared library gets built). Are there any plans to add also a shared libs for unix ? Thx in advance, Joerg