After much suffering and hunting irrelevant issues I discovered that
with Python 3.8 the PATH is no longer taken into account when looking
for DLLs on Windows, and thus all my module imports fail with the most
extremely anger-inducing nondescript trash message ever:
ImportError: DLL load failed while importing utility: The specified module could not be found.
Fortunately, I have been already doing a very nasty hardcoding operation
for this very problem, for the prebuilt tools, so all that was needed
was turning that into something nicer the user can have control over.
If enabled, this causes sys.setdlopenflags() being called with
RTLD_GLOBAL before the native Corrade module is loaded, in a hope to
resolve recurring nightmares with static Corrade and Magnum libraries
being linked into multiple dynamic modules.
That makes it much easier to handle in that case (because that's the
whole point of static builds) and also nicely circumvents any issues
with duplicated global data when a static lib would be linked to
multiple dynamic libraries.
Vladimír Vondruš