python 2.7.x on MacOSX: failed dlopen() on .so's

[Paul Smith]

On Wed, 2013-11-13 at 16:00 -0800, Ned Deily wrote:
> > The reason I've set PYTHONHOME is ultimately I need this installation to
> > be relocatable.  It's going to be shared across lots of different
> > systems and they'll have the ability to copy it wherever they want.
> 
> That could be problematic. You need to be *really* careful about how
> you do that.  You stand a chance with a non-shared installation.

You mean, --disable-shared?  That's what I want, ultimately, but I was
going to start with the default configuration first.

I'm discovering that this is tricky.  I don't want to bring OS wars into
it, but this kind of thing is so simple and just works on GNU/Linux.  I
guess I've been spoiled :-).

I'm somewhat dreading my next effort after MacOS: the same thing, on
Windows :-/.

And another task, which seems like it will be fun: building GDB on
MacOSX with Python support enabled...

> You still should not need to set PYTHONHOME.  Also, be aware that
> executables and libraries built on one version of OS X are not
> guaranteed to work on other versions, particularly older versions
> unless you take certain precautions.  Even non-shared Pythons on OS X
> dynamically link with system-supplied libraries which can vary across
> os releases.  And not all libraries are supplied, so, depending on
> your needs, you may need to supply some additional third-party
> libraries.

This is why I'm building on this very old system, and am loath to update
it.

One saving grace is that while I need my installation to be relocatable,
I _don't_ need it to be infinitely portable across MacOSX systems.  I'm
using it internally only and so I have some control over the version of
MacOS and the hardware that it's running on.  I don't need to worry
about non-Intel hardware, or versions of MacOS prior to the one I'm
using here.

> For the python.org OS X binary installers, we go to a fair amount of
> trouble to build Pythons that will work across a range of OS X
> releases.  You might want to consider using one of them as a base.
> It's usually a lot less work than trying to make it work yourself.

Hm, that's an idea.  I don't HAVE to build Python myself, actually, I
just need (a) it to be relocatable, and (b) to add these extra modules
to it so I can use it across systems without installing them
individually by hand.

Thanks, I'll look into this further.