[Pythonmac-SIG] Does the dl module serve a useful purpose on MacOSX?

[Bob Ippolito]

On Monday, Feb 17, 2003, at 11:03 America/New_York, Jack Jansen wrote:

> Folks,
> does anyone know whether the dl module serves a useful purpose on 
> MacOSX?
>
> Somehow fink installed dlfcn.h and libdl.a, and when building Python
> the main setup.py picks up dlfcn.h but not libdl.a. I either have to 
> add
> logic to find the latter too, or I have to disable the dl module on
> MacOSX.
>
> What is the best option?
>

The dl library is part of the Darwin distribution (libcompat).

I'm pretty sure it's worthless from Python, I vote to disable the 
module.  libcompat is just a dyld wrapper that exposes a *nix-like 
libdl API.  It was only useful when dynload_next was broken and you 
were compiling your own Python.  It's likely part of Fink to aid 
porting of other projects that support libdl for loading plug-ins or 
extensions.

-bob