[Pythonmac-SIG] Re: Mac OS X 10.1 build changes

[Jack Jansen]

> > I think a better solution here would be to simply set the extension for 
> > shared libraries to
> > ".dylib" on OSX, in stead of the more common ".so". After all, they're 
> > really
> > the same thing, and there are no .so's on OSX.
> >
> > What do you think?
> 
> Well, I just did a quick search of my drive and the only .so's that I 
> have other than Python are
> 	a) apache modules that came with the system and
> 	b) those unix packages that I've installed myself (readline, bzip, 
> expat).
> 
> While it's probably a great idea to use the ".dylib" extension for all 
> Mac OS X shared libraries, I'm not sure if I'm up to modifying all the 
> Unix packages that use .so's so that python or some other package looks 
> for for them can find them. ;-)  In other words, if we modified python 
> to handle only dylibs then we need to modify every other package to emit 
> dylibs so that python can find them.  And since both of them work, I'll 
> take the easy way out and just go for allowing both .so and .dylibs on 
> Mac OS X.

Hmm you're right, of course. Bah, bah, bah. I wonder whether a better solution 
then wouldn't be to have a allow two extensions (.so and .dylib) for shared 
libraries, in stead of adding a new type dylib, which is really 100% the same 
as "shared" but only with a different extension.

Should we drop this on the distutils mailing list, or is it too minor an issue 
to bother about?
--
Jack Jansen             | ++++ stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal ++++
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