[Pythonmac-SIG] How to remove Python from my Mac?

[Ethan Herdrick]

Thank you for the info.  Things are working OK now, so I'm going to stick
with what I've got and not kill anything.  I just wiped out the old
dir I had specified as install_lib in .pydistutils.cfg , then restored
that value (that is, the install_lib value in .pydistutils.cfg) to
what it was supposed to be,
~/Library/Python/$py_version_short/site-packages .  Then I used
setup.py on the module I was trying to install.  Everything seems to be
working OK now.

Good thing you guys prevented me from wiping out my pre-installed
Python.  I had assumed it was expendable.

Thanks!
-Ethan


On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 4:13 PM, Russell E. Owen <rowen at u.washington.edu> wrote:
> In article
> <91f48dbf0904241533k3722b56au56bb7726eed30229 at mail.gmail.com>,
>  Ethan Herdrick <info at reatlas.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi - I'm getting started with Python and am getting ImportError
>> trouble with the first step of the very simple tutorial for web.py.
>> I'm suspecting that the fact that I have two installations of Python -
>> one that my Mac came with and one that I installed from
>> python-2.6.2-macosx2009-04-16.dmg which I got from
>> python.org/download/ - might be the problem.
>>
>> Also, in trying to get this thing going I was fiddling with the
>> install_lib setting in .pydistutils.cfg and left it in a modified
>> state before running setup.py on a module, so the module ended up in a
>> strange location.
>>
>> Anyway, I'd really be happier if I could wipe all python stuff -
>> including things like easy_install - from my machine so I can just
>> start over.  This seems to be harder than it sounds.  True?  And how
>> do I do this?
>
> Wiping the user-installed python is easy. Just delete:
> /Library/Frameworks/Python.Framework
>
> To do this from terminal you can type:
> rm -rf /Library/Frameworks/Python.Framework
>
> Note that you can also delete just a particular version if python if you
> have more than one -- just look in the directory mentioned above.
>
> This may leave some symlinks in /usr/local/bin, but if you plan to
> install a fresh python you can ignore them because they will get
> overwritten. Otherwise look for python* and in the case of Python 2.6,
> also *2to3*
>
> If you messed up your system python, that can be harder, but at least
> user-installed packages that were properly installed are easy to remove.
> Look in /Library/Python/2.3/site-packages/
> (e.g. in Terminal type "open /Library/Python/2.3/site-packages")
> and remove everything except ReadMe and Extras.pth
> Then you can look at Extras.pth and make sure it only has one line that
> points somewhere in /System
> (you can delete any additional lines).
>
> For some reason I found I also have /Library/Python/2.5; not sure where
> that came from but it is basically empty (just contains
> site-packages/README). You might want to look for the 2.6 version and
> make sure it is basically empty.
>
> -- Russell
>
>
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