Python 2.3.2 RPM's for Redhat 8.0 or Python source RPM and upgrade procedure?

Scott Chapman scott_list at mischko.com
Fri Oct 3 17:46:41 EDT 2003


On Friday 03 October 2003 12:15, Skip Montanaro wrote:
<snip>
> The result probably won't be pleasant if it contains any extension modules.
> Also, Red Hat has a lot of their own stuff which may not have been tested
> on 2.3 yet.  This might be your biggest barrier.  At the very least you
> should probably leave 2.2 in place and leave /usr/bin/python as a link to
> /usr/bin/python2.2 until you've had a chance to test some of their more
> important system administration apps with 2.3 (like up2date).
>
>     Scott> Does the entire site-packages contents need to be rebuilt (or
>     Scott> reinstalled) with the new Python or will it automatically do so
>     Scott> (I mean the .pyc files).  Do I need to manually remove all the
>     Scott> byte-compiled files?
>
> At the very least I suggest you delete any .pyc or .pyo files.  You can
> then just execute the Lib/compileall.py script to recompile everything.

Peter Hansen said in his post:
> Sean, I believe you *would* have to copy over the site-packages contents
> from the 2.2 installation to the 2.3 folder, but don't count on everything
> working... only pure Python code will generally continue to work without
> a new download and install of a 2.3-compatible version of your extension.

The non-pure Python stuff might break.  It would be very NICE for the 
Lib/compileall.py (for example) to tell you which things need further 
attention but I don't know if that information is available to a script.

<rant>
Upgrading seems to ALWAYS be painful with these scripting languages.  Perl is 
no better.  I'd like to see Python beat Perl out in this arena (some friendly 
competition, huh? Where the end user benefits! :-) I'm running RedHat so 
their dependency on Python is a mixed blessing also. 

We, end users who are just getting into Python, look at this as something that 
should be "seamless" when in actuality it's a major change to upgrade a 
programming language environment that you have lots of dependencies around.  
This change should be properly orchestrated and tested and it's probably a 
bit naive to expect it to be seamless like a simple one-off.
</rant>

So the best advice is to figure out which all extension modules I have 
installed manually and download new versions and install them?

Scott





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