[Distutils] Dynamic linking on Linux, Mac OS, et al

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 06:20 AM 1/6/2006 +0100, Matthias Urlichs wrote:
>Phillip J. Eby:
> > It could perhaps be questioned whether it's a good idea to include any
> > other kind of shared library in an extension project
>
>It is not.
>
>You will end up with multiple copies of extension libraries, all subtly
>different, scattered in various .egg directories. You guess what happens
>if two of these try to use the "same" library (hint: it's not pretty and
>even less debuggable). You guess what happens, or rather what will not
>happen, if a security problem is discovered in one of these libraries.

Um, the "other kind" I'm referring to here are the ones that are 
exclusively part of the extension in question, e.g. libPyICU.  This library 
is not going to be found anywhere else except in other versions of PyICU, 
so that issue doesn't really apply here, since only one egg will have 
extensions loading the library into a given process.


>Besides, Unix systems these days tend to have the required libraries
>installed anyway.

Not libPyICU, since it's a part of PyICU.  Similar issues may apply to 
other multi-extension projects that need to share a large chunk of code.