building a linux executable

[Prateek]

On Oct 24, 5:25 pm, Paul Boddie <p... at boddie.org.uk> wrote:
> On 24 Okt, 14:20, Bjoern Schliessmann <usenet-
>
> mail-0306.20.chr0n... at spamgourmet.com> wrote:
>
> > I'm sorry I cannot help, but how many linux distros have no python
> > installed or no packages of it?
>
> It's not usually the absence of Python that's the problem. What if
> your application uses various extension modules which in turn rely on
> various libraries (of the .so or .a kind)? It may be more convenient
> to bundle all these libraries instead of working out the package
> dependencies for all the target distributions, even if you know them
> all.
>
> Paul

Thanks Paul,

So I've bundled all the extension modules (cx_Freeze helped me out
with that). Here is what I did:

if sys.platform.startswith("linux"):
    import [add a bunch of imports here]

This import statement immediately imports all modules which will be
required. Hence, cx_Freeze is easily able to find them and I can put
all the .so files with the distro.

The problem is that some of these .so files (_hashlib.so) are hard-
linked to /lib/libssl.so and /lib/libcrypto.so. I cannot simply just
copy those (libssl/libcrypto) files into the distribution folder (and
cx_Freeze won't do anything about them because they are not Python
modules). I need a way to figure out how to get _hashlib.so to refer
to a libssl.so which is in the same directory (I would have thunk that
it should use the PATH environment variable - apparently not).

This seems to be a simple enough problem, doesn't it??

NB: Has the community come up with a better way to distribute Python
executables on linux? I'd also like to hear from folks who've got
linux distributables of medium to large scale python programs...