On Thu, 2004-11-25 at 23:08 -0800, Rick Graves wrote:> Post Turkey Day (#1 Shopping Day) Greetings!
>
> I am running CentOS-3 as a desktop distribution.
> Everything is fine except for Idle, the integrated
> development environment that comes with Python.
> Python is version 2.2, but Idle is version 0.8. The
> Idle 0.8 keyboard is driving me nuts.
>
> On my Windows box, I downloaded from www.python.org
> and installed Python, and got Python 2.3 and Idle
> 1.0.8, which is MUCH BETTER -- so much better, even
> for code intended to be run only in Linux, I would
> much rather code Python in Windows!
>
> Fedora comes with Python 2.3.
>
> I have my own CentOS mirror, so I added a fedora
> mirror on the side, and I used rsync to grab only the
> python files from fedora mirrors.
>
> I ran yum check-update. As a result, yum downloaded
> all the headers and reported no problems. But when I
> ran yum update, yum balked, giving a list of packages
> that are dependent on python2.2, "that is not
> available". The packages listed are:
>
> authconfig-gtk
> comps-extras
> firstboot
> redhat-config-date
> redhat-config-keyboard
> redhat-config-kickstartrhpl
> redhat-config-language
> redhat-config-mouse
> redhat-config-nfs
> redhat-config-rootpassword
> redhat-config-samba
> redhat-config-securitylevel
> redhat-config-soundcardredhat-config-users
> redhat-config-xfree86
>
> When I wrote to the yum mailing list, I put in:
>
> "Unless Python 2.3 breaks those packages (which I
> think
> is unlikely), I thought I should be able to upgrade
> Python to a newer version without this kind of
> objection."
>
> Seth wrote back that python 2.3 would break some of
> the packages, aparently because the packages have
> hardcoded paths, and the change of location from
> /usr/lib/python2.2 to /usr/lib/python2.3 would break
> some.
>
> One possible work around would be to grab the packages
> on the above list from fedora in addition to just the
> python packages, but I would consider that a last
> resort.
>
> One off the wall idea is to install python 2.3, but
> leave python 2.2 there for the packages with hardcoded
> paths. (I am not sure whether yum would cooperate on
> this plan.)
>
> Is there a cleaner solution to this problem?
You'd be better off leaving python 2.2 alone and install python 2.3 in a
different dir and using it for your devel work.
Modifying a basic and important interpreter like python (esp for red
hat-based systems) is generally a bad idea.
It'd be like deciding to replace glibc in centos with glibc from fedora
core 3.
-sv