> find_library() is documented as emulating a build-time linker, not run-time

It may be documented as that, but is emulating a build-time linker the most useful thing? In the context of Python binding to external libraries, why is build-time linking behaviour better than run-time linking behaviour? This is an enhancement request, not a bug request: so if a change was to be applied, the documentation could be updated to indicate any change in behaviour.

The use case is that a shared library needed by a Python extension is available on LD_LIBRARY_PATH such that a non-ctypes linking operation would find it, but ctypes.util.find_library() won't, so a user of the extension (who may not be its developer) can't load the extension easily. See also my comment http://bugs.python.org/issue9998#msg165806