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

[Paul Smith]

On Thu, 2013-11-14 at 10:36 -0800, Ned Deily wrote:
> In article <1384442536.3496.532.camel at pdsdesk>,
>  Paul Smith <paul at mad-scientist.net> wrote:
> [...]
> > By relocatable I mean "runnable from any location"; i.e., not fixed.  I
> > have a wrapper around the Python executable that can compute the correct
> > root directory and set any environment variables or add flags or
> > whatever might be needed.
> 
> In that case, the python.org installer may not be a good choice.  You should 
> be to accomplish what you want by building your own Python.   You'll probably 
> find you were getting tripped up by unnecessarily setting environment 
> variables.  Good luck!

Thanks Ned.  I got sidetracked for a while but I got back to this now,
and I found my problem.

The makefile I was using to control the build on Linux was stripping the
python executable to make it smaller.

However, stripping the python executable on MacOSX breaks it completely
so it can't load its shared libraries and I get errors as in my original
message.  If I remove the "strip" operation, then everything starts to
work as expected.