Bad hack fix around a bizarre problem...

[Diez B. Roggisch]

Just Another Victim of the Ambient Morality schrieb:
>     I'm trying to write a Python program that manipulates a MySQL database 
> and have chosen to use MySQLdb.  So, I used by system's package manager, 
> YUM, and it appeared to install correctly.  So, I tried it out and got this 
> error:
> 
> 
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
>   File "MySQLdb/__init__.py", line 22, in ?
>     raise ImportError, "this is MySQLdb version %s, but _mysql is version 
> %r" %\
> ImportError: this is MySQLdb version (1, 2, 2, 'final', 0), but _mysql is 
> version (1, 2, 1, 'final', 1)
> 
> 
>     It looks like the MySQLdb version doesn't match the _mysql version.  If 
> these were two different libraries, I might understand how this error 
> happened.  However, they're part of the same library.  _mysql is just a 
> Python binding to the MySQL C API and MySQLdb is just a Python wrapper 
> around _mysql to be compliant with the Python DB specification.  They were 
> both part of the same library so how did their versions fall out of sync? 
> That's like getting a Windows application with incompatible DLLs!
> 
>     So, my bad hack of a fix is to copy the MySQLdb python code to a local 
> directory (where my python program will eventually reside) and, on this 
> local copy, comment out the version check.  The idea is that MySQLdb is pure 
> Python, so it's unlikely that there is any incompatibility between it and 
> the very thin layer that is _mysql.  The local copy is so I don't forget 
> that I'm using a modified version of this library.  Python seems to import 
> this over the global one.  I've done a bit of testing and, so far, it 
> appears to work!
>     What is my problem?  A google search reveals that I'm not the only 
> person with this problem but it also reveals that absolutely no one knows 
> how to fix this.  What are the chances that my fix will backfire?  Thank 
> you... 

I guess the package maintainer messed up. If you'd install MySQLdb from 
source, it won't happen I guess. So I'd contact the package maintainer.

Diez