Repairing Python installation?

[Percival John Hackworth]

On 28-Oct-2017, Martin Schöön wrote
(in article <f5k8buF4lr2U1 at mid.individual.net>):

> It seems something is amiss with my Python 2.7 installation. Revisiting
> Nikola (static web site generator written in Python) for the first time
> in several years the other day I experience some unexpected problems. I
> got some help form the Nikola people and the conclusion is something
> is broken with my Python 2.7. Pip list throws exceptions at me while
> pip3 list works the way I expect it to do.
>
> All this is happening on a Debian machine.
>
> Questions:
>
> Should I try to pinpoint what is broken (and how is that done) or should
> I just remove everything Python 2.7 and re-install?
>
> Could mixing pip installs with Debian distro installs of Python
> packages lead to conflicts or other problems?
>
> TIA,
>
> /Martin

If this site is accessible from the internet, have you looked around other 
parts of the system? Like date/timestamps for /bin/*. I recently was asked to 
look at a friends web site and found they were doing several things that I 
consider a security no-no, like running the tomcat server as root to serve 
their web site. It had been root-kitted. I helped them setup a new system 
that ran tomcat under a non-priv user.

It's just a SWAG, but perhaps something further is amiss that you don't see. 
I was really surprised that my friend, a pretty good programmer, was clueless 
about such things.

The only other time I've seen python "damaged" was when some developer 
decided they wanted a more current version than the default installed on the 
CentOS system (2.6) which is required for updating the system. They borked it 
beyond repair and my boss took away root access after we repaired it.