Are *.pyd's universal?

[Albert Hopkins]

On Sat, 2009-10-31 at 23:58 +1300, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> I just checked my Debian installation:
> 
>     ldo at theon:~> find /lib /usr/lib -name \*.so -a -not -name lib\*
> -print | wc -l
>     2950
>     ldo at theon:~> find /lib /usr/lib -name \*.so -print | wc -l
>     4708
> 
> So 63% of the shareable libraries on my system have names NOT
> beginning with lib.
> 
> Any better theories? 

Those are likely not system (sharable) libraries (e.g. libcrypt). These
are probably plugins loaded by a specific program, for example PAM
modules, ImageMagick plugins, python modules, etc.  so since they are
not in your library path the do not stand getting accidentally loaded
(e.g. when a binary is linked against libcrypt.so).  These libraries are
loaded directly by the program using their exact path name and dlopen().

The issue with windows they were saying is that Windows will load the
library with that name if it is in your current directory.  So if you
happen to have a python library called CRYPT.DLL and you are in that
directory and try to run a program that loads CRYPT.DLL then you will be
loading the python module instead of the Windows one (I have no idea if
Windows has a CRYPT.DLL).

OTOH this doesn't happen in Linux because a) programs wanting the
system's crypt library are looking for libcrypt.so and b) Linux doesn't
look in your current directory (by default) for libraries.