> Does anyone have any valid use cases where they want to use a shared library on LD_LIBRARY_PATH or similar

I presume that would include this issue's creator and other people who have commented here about what they see as a drawback in find_library's current behaviour.

Pau Tallada's point about wanting to use a cross-platform invocation also seems reasonable. Remember, if you know the exact library you want to use, you don't *need* find_library: and this issue is about making find_library useful in a wider set of cases than it currently is.

> The problem I see with using find_library() to blindly load a library

Nobody is saying that the result of find_library() has to be used to blindly load a library. The point you make about the code in the uuid module is orthogonal to the proposal in this issue - even the behaviour of find_library never changed, that code could break for the reasons you give. For that, it's not unreasonable to raise a separate issue about possible fragility of the code in uuid.

I asked a question which I think is relevant to this enhancement request - "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?"

Do you have an answer to that?