On Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:25:03 PST Ben Golding <bgg at object-craft.com.au> wrote:
> I do software development and deploy on Open Solaris. I'd like to > upgrade the default python to python2.6 but I'm leery of doing that > because of the package dependencies in vendor-packages (ie, > /usr/lib/python2.4/vendor-packages). These aren't readily > transferrable because some of them are linked against the python2.4 > version that's installed. You are right to be leery of this. Upgrading the system version of python is hazardous to the health of most systems, for a number of reasons. Fortunately, you don't need to. Python is quite happy with multiple versions of python installed on the system. All you have to do is make sure that the python executable the system uses don't change. So long as you do that, you're fine. > This blog talks about precisely this occurring: > http://malsserver.blogspot.com/2009/01/python-25-breaks-opensolaris-menus.html He broke the world by changing /usr/bin/python. When he fixed that, things worked again. His complaining that "Python 2.5 breaks OpenSolaris menus" is like complaining that "rm breaks OpenSolaris booting" because if you do "rm -rf /boot", OpenSolaris won't boot any more. > Is there a process which supports this upgrade? That's likely to > translate to is there an IPS pkg which will install the > vendor-packages for python2.6? No, there isn't. However, the package you want is SUNWPython26. That has the vendor-packaged python2.6 in it. It doesn't replace the executables the system uses, so the system works fine after you install it. Since no applications use it, it won't have any of the optional packages installed, so you'll probably want to install some set of modules for it as well. You might want to add a symlink to /usr/bin/python2.6 (or /usr/amd64/bin/python2.6) called python somewhere where there isn't already a python (and maybe pydoc, etc.) as well, so you can invoke them without having to worry about the version. <mike -- Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> http://www.mired.org/consulting.html Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information. O< ascii ribbon campaign - stop html mail - www.asciiribbon.org
