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IMHO this patch has a couple of problems.

The main one is that GNU configure has standard options for enabling shared library support, --enable/disable-shared/static. They should be used!

The other is that it's Linux-only. Shared library support tends to work well, for varying definitions of "well" anyway, on lots of platforms, but you really need to use libtool for it. That would also get rid of the LD_PRELOAD, since that'd be encapsulated by libtool.

It's a rather bigger job to convert something like Python to libtool properly instead of hacking the Makefile a bit, and the build will definitely get somewhat slower as a result, BUT if we agree that a shared Python library is a good idea (i think it is!), the work is definitely worth doing.