[pylucene-dev] Re: building JCC on Windows with MinGW

[Bill Janssen]

> > Also if you don't mind to explain, what is this shared option, I
> > couldn't find it (easily) on google? What's the difference with normal
> > python extension?
> 
> This new --shared option is used by JCC to compile a Python extension (such 
> as PyLucene) so that it can be used along with other JCC-compiled extensions 
> in the same process. This requires that a portion of JCC itself be compiled 
> as a shared library (a DLL on Windows) as opposed to a just Python 
> extension. Historically, distutils/setuptools has not been capable of 
> building such regular shared libraries and use them. The newest setuptools 
> (>= 0.6c7) can do this now on some platforms as Bill and I are slowly 
> discovering (with caveats).

I'm wondering:  do we really need two shared libraries for JCC?  The
jcc.pyd file (or libjcc.so on Unix) is a bona fide shared library
already.  Why are we generating jcc.dll as well?  Is this a packaging
play?  Is the intention that we can build PyLucene --shared, then
distribute just it and the jcc.dll file, without needing to distribute
the whole jcc module?  If so, how much are we buying with this?

Bill