[Pythonmac-SIG] Python shared libraries

[Mark Easton]

Bob,

Thanks for the thorough response.  Firstly, sorry for slipping and
mentioning MacProlog.  It has nothing to do with what I'm doing, but
crept out of the recesses of my mind - possibly as I learnt Prolog on a
Mac nigh on 10 years ago.

Having previously looked long and hard in /System/Library/Frameworks to
no avail, your response has lead me to exactly the right location for
the MacPython framework, and now I've looked through these frameworks
I've seen that they're a great idea.  However, I've looked at the
Python.framework and seen that it does not contain a shared library
which is what I really need.

Some background:

PythonNET enables Python scripts to call .NET assemblies by wrapping a
Python console within a .NET program, which it does by referencing
python as a shared library.  Now Python running on Windows comes with a
shared library/DLL and Python on GNU/Linux allows one to be built
(libPython2.x.so) if you install it with:
./configure --enable-shared
make 
make install

So I need some means to create a shared version of the Python library on
MacOSX which I would expect would be called something like
libpython.2.x.dylib.  When I build Python manually using the same
commands as for Linux everything is fine, apart from the fact that I
don't get a shared library.  When I install MacProlog from binary I get
a framework, but it doesn't contain a shared library so I'm still none
the wiser.

Now if I knew enough about Mac OS X development I'd try and build my own
shared library by ar'ing the libpython2.3.a file and then compiling the
object files into a shared library - in actual fact I started with this
approach - but as the dev tools are a little unfamiliar I cannot get gcc
to anything more than groan at me!

So if anyone can give me a helping hand with how to build a Mac OS X
version of the Python shared library then I will be over the moon.  If
not it looks like its time to bury my head and get down to some good old
tinkering with gcc

Cheers

Mark