Re: pyoctave not working on ubuntu/fedora

[Mike Miller]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2016 at 12:12:08 +0200, JuanPi wrote:
> So I went to complain on launchpad
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/python2.7/+bug/1572328
> and it seems they are intentionally building libpytohn2.7 differently
> from Debian
> 
> What would be the solution?

In https://bitbucket.org/mtmiller/pytave/issues/3/dlopen-hack, Colin
uses dlopen to force the libpython symbols to be globally available.
I think we may need to do this to work around this feature that distros
have started using.

I propose the following changes:

 * create an "init_python" function to load a single instance of
   libpython and instantiate the interpreter
 * use octave_shlib instead of dlopen to open and store a persistent
   handle to the libpython shared library
 * maybe down the road have two implementations of "init_python" for
   Python 2 and 3 so the Octave user can choose between them
 * this init function is also where the octave_python value type can be
   registered with the Octave type system

-- 
mike