dl module is missing?

[Colin Watson]

The Python 2.7 documentation documents the "dl" module (I know it's deprecated and has been removed in Python 3), but it doesn't actually exist:

  >>> import dl
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  ImportError: No module named dl

Seen with both 2.7.12-1ubuntu0~16.04.1 (xenial amd64) and 2.7.14-2ubuntu2 (artful amd64).

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

I'm not sure that this was ever enabled. it's documented as "a highly experimental and dangerous device for calling *arbitrary* C functions in *arbitrary* shared libraries".

I'd like to keep it disabled.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Your changelog entry for 2.2.1-1 suggests that it was enabled once.

As far as I can tell there's no other terribly sensible way to get at the value of RTLD_NOW in Python 2; I was helping a friend who was writing a complicated thing to do with the Python gdb bindings that needed that and that needed to work in both Python 2 and 3. (In Python 3, it's os.RTLD_NOW.)

[Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox)]

annoyingly python2 has: ctypes.RTLD_GLOBAL ctypes.RTLD_LOCAL, but not ctypes.RTLD_NOW

[Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox)]

I wonder if https://pypi.python.org/pypi/backports.os https://github.com/pjdelport/backports.os should grow this feature, since python3 is the future.