Re: Butchered python configuration ...

[Florian Kulzer <florian.kulzer+debian@icfo.es>]

On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 14:19:28 +1200, Sam wrote:
> Okay this is ungraceful entrance to this mailing list but I hope that
> someone can help. I seem to have butchered my default Python install
> somewhat. The server is running Debian 'etch' and I wanted to make
> python2.5 the default install so I decided to link python2.5 to python
> in /usr/bin?

I would not do this; the expected default version is 2.4 on Etch. You
can explicitly refer to your desired version of python in your own code
without changing the default.

> The present state of /usr/bin:
> dev3:/usr/bin# ls -la python*
> -rwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1015264 2008-10-23 08:53 python
> -rwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1015264 2008-10-23 08:53 python2.4
> -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    1276 2008-10-23 08:53 python2.4-config

IIRC, /usr/bin/python should be a symlink to /usr/bin/python2.4 on Etch.

[...]

> Setting up python2.4-minimal (2.4.4-3+etch2) ...
> Linking and byte-compiling packages for runtime python2.4...
> Traceback (most recent call last):

[...]

>   File "/usr/share/pycentral-data/pyversions.py", line 120, in default_version
>     _default_version = link = os.readlink('/usr/bin/python')
> OSError: [Errno 22] Invalid argument: '/usr/bin/python'

pyversions.py tries to follow the /usr/bin/python symlink to find out
what the default version is; this fails if /usr/bin/python is not a
symlink.

> dpkg: error processing python2.4-minimal (--configure):
>  subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1

[ snip: this causes problems for all packages that depend on
  python2.4-minimal ]

The first thing to do is to restore the /usr/bin/python symlink and then
run "apt-get install -f". Note that the symlink should use the direct
relative path to python2.4, without any directory components in it.

-- 
Regards,            | http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer
          Florian   |