Visibility of symbols between extension modules

[Sudharshan S]

Hi all,
I have been learning to write extension modules using the C API that
python provides, and have hit a minor roadblock that is turning out to
be major headache.
My project essentially is organized as follows,

                 foo
                  |
   ---------------------------------
   |              |                |
  bar            _foo             baz

_foo basically does some init stuff, nothing much. Thats where the
problem starts. The "handler" variable which is initialized in _foo
isn't visible to others. One solution that worked was calling the
initializing function in each of the module's PyMODINIT_FUNC. Debugging
through the interpreter I found out the it loads all the .so's and
executes PyMODINIT_FUNCs. But by doing so, the routine to initialize the
handle gets executed three times, something which i find to be sort of
unclean. 
The definition of the variable is included in a header and the sources
of the other modules include this master header, So I do have that
variable in scope, but its not initialized. _foo does the job of
declaring that variable.
I did my share of RTFM and found CObjects as a potential alternative.
But I feel its use rather complicated for a single variable that goes
out of scope. Is there any other way to solve this, or is my approach
itself borked =(?, What am I missing?

Thanks for your help
-- 
Sudharshan S
http://www.sudharsh.wordpress.com