Installing Python 2.4 on Linux

[Marcin Stępnicki]

Dnia Tue, 05 Apr 2005 21:21:37 +0000, Edward Diener napisal(a):

> I can install Python 2.4 on the Fedora 3 Linux system, but after I do a 
> number of Linux utilities and commands, like yum, stop working because 
> they were dependent on the Python 2.3 installation. What happens is that 
> Python 2.4 replaces the /usr/bin/python module with the Python 2.4 
> version. If I replace /usr/bin/python with the Python 2.3 version 
> executable, which is still on my system, that all the aforesaid modules 
> depend on, they start working again, but I can no longer execute 
> modules, like IDLE, which was part of my Python 2.4 distribution.
> 
> What is the solution to this ? The operating system was installed with 
> Python 2.3 and the development libraries but no tools, doc, or 
> otherwise. I have installed Python 2.4 with all the RPMs and copied down 
> the Python 2.4 documentation to my machine ( since python24-docs.rpm 
> gives one very little ). I would naturally like to use Python 2.4 
> without killing all the commands that depend on Python 2.3. No doubt 
> these commands have their modules in the site libraries for Python 2.3. 
> Of course I would love to update these dependencies to use Python 2.4 
> but newer RPMs for these commands do not exist.
> 
> I do not know whether this is a Python problem or a Fedora 3 problem but 
> I thought I would ask here first and see if anybody else had the same 
> problem. I imagine the problem might exist on other Linux systems.

It's rather Fedora related, I have Python 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4 on my Ubuntu
box and they seem to coexist without problems.

If you can afford breaking package dependencies a bit, save a copy of
python2.3 binary somewhere and recreate it after installing Python 2.4,
OR make a symbolic link /usr/bin/python to /usr/bin/python2.3 and use
/usr/bin/python2.4 explicitely when you want to use the newer version. You
may also try to link modules from /usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages to
/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages (all or just few of them) - most should
be upwards compatible. It may make Fedora utilities work again
(you haven't provided error messages, so it's hard to tell) even with
Python 2.4.

-- 
   Przed siebie idziesz i zabijasz      | http://apcoln.linuxpl.org 
 Nic nie czujac w serce sztylet wbijasz | http://biznes.linux.pl
----------------------------------------| http://www.juanperon.info
     JID: Aragorn_Vime at jabber.org       | http://www.naszedzieci.org