Python as shared library on Unix

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

I'm currently in the process of porting a Python embedding from
Windows to Linux and have come across an appearent problem.

Under Windows I have linked my app dynamically to the pythonXX.dll using
LoadLibrary/GetProcAddress and that works very nicely. Under Linux I see
no option to build a python.so.2.2.1 or similar to link my application
to with the dl* functions.

My question is if I have overlooked some option in ./configure or
somewhere else or if this is not possible out of the box? If it is
not available as a standard, what are the changes to get it working
by modifying the ./configure and or Makefile scripts?

I read in the documentation that under Windows one needs to link to
the DLL in order to have dynamic module loading available, for the
Mac OS X part there where some adjustments in the past to make sure
that sys.executable was pointing to the user executable instead of
the shared module. I could think of several such pitfals which could
show up when creating a Linux shared library.

I can of course always link the Python core into my application which
by the way is a shared library itself which is loaded dynamically
into the main application but coming from the Windows world, this
seems kind of unelegant to me.

Rolf Kalbermatter