I’m trying to run a Python project that uses libnfc in nix-shell. The code does

ctypes.util.find_library('nfc')

and for some strange reason this returns just libnfc.so.5. I’m not sure how find_library works, but the docs say:

On Linux, find_library() tries to run external programs (/sbin/ldconfig, gcc, and objdump) to find the library file.

Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to work, even though g++ successfully builds a C++ program that depends on libnfc. Any ideas why this is happening? Why isn’t it able to figure out the path to libnfc? Shouldn’t ctypes.util.find_library be patched in nixpkgs to avoid running weird programs and just check the environment variables?