RedHat 7.3 and Python2.2.1

[Paul Boddie]

writeson at earthlink.net (Doug Farrell) wrote in message news:<88bc63c6.0209030640.71e074ff at posting.google.com>...
> To everyone who responded,
> 
> Thanks you for all your help, much appreciated. I ended up solving the
> problem (at least I hope so, and didn't create more for myself! <g>)
> by doing the following:
> 
> rpm -ivh --replacefiles python-2.2*

I do wonder if that should have been "-Uvh", but then my strategy with
RPM installation tends to involve stripping away the conflicting
packages (with "--erase") and installing the new ones in their place.
Indeed, I did this recently with KDE and found Python very useful in
the automation of the process - popen2 and os were most helpful in
identifying and removing the 30 or so old packages. ;-)

> The --replacefiles option seemed to eliminate the file conflicts and
> the RedHat tools (like up2date) still are working.

I suppose that Python 2.2.1 attempts to act just like Python 2.2 and
that various files/directories are identically named. Whilst this is
likely to confuse the RPM system, there's a reasonable chance that the
replacement files will do more or less what the old ones did. There's
still a risk that various extension modules won't exist in the
newly-installed package, but then they probably won't have been
deleted from the filesystem if you do a "package overwrite" in the
manner illustrated, and the extension API probably won't have changed
enough to cause severe problems when loading old extension modules
from Python 2.2 into Python 2.2.1.

Even though the concepts behind package management are sound, the RPM
implementation seems to be a solid justification for building packages
from source, however.

Paul