This ticket is for the investigation part of creating a "draft" standalone library. In 3-4 days, we should be able to discover, with a quick POC, if this work is feasible in a short time frame (like can we get test/format or some of our standalone tests to start up). If so, another ticket will be created, (about 4-5 days) which will do any finishing details, including code-review enough to make it usable.

The idea is to create a "draft" standalone library for the server's PALI implementation.  What we need from this library:

• the PALI code and anything more needed by it is packaged as a .so library that can be loaded via WT's extension mechanism.
• it is functional enough to be used by at least a few Python tests (for sanity) as a replacement for PALM
• it is functional enough to be used by test/format as a replacement for PALM.
• it is allowed to have external shell scripts (or some equivalent) to start needed infrastructure or docker containers for any disagg modules.

Since this is meant to be used at first only for some WT test runs, it does not need to be pretty or maintainable (though those things are a plus).  It will not necessarily be used as a basis for future work to build a standalone library (again, a plus if it is helpful for that).

This is a WT ticket, because: 1) work will be done by WT team 2) it won't result in any SERVER changes (though in the best case it may serve as a POC for future SERVER work), 3) may require WT changes to use it (these changes may or may not be changed in the develop tree, TBD). 4) may be somewhat informal in approach: this ticket might not result in a pull request, possibly just a temporary branch or diffs.  If it allows a cobbled-up test format to do some long runs, it will be worth the effort.

I'll add a couple quick implementation thoughts as a comment.