On Sun, 22 Nov 2009 09:05:47 PST
Malachi de AElfweald <malachid at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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.
> Installing the Python 2.5 package changed that symlink to 2.5 and
> broke everything. I changed it to get everything working again.
> Was there a better solution?
Nope, the package broke the system by changing an executable it
shouldn't have. Putting the executable back to what it was is the
correct solution, just as restoring /boot would be the correct
solution if you had installed a package that removed it.
My apologies for implying you had made the mistake. That the package
overwrote /usr/bin/python is a bug in the package. The SUNWPython25
(and SUNWPython26, for that matter) package doesn't do that, and you
don't say where the upgrade came from. Adding that as a warning to
others might help them avoid the problem.
It may be possible to fix things by installing the python2.5 version
of all the appropriate libraries. But that assumes that there's a
version of the library that works on python2.5. And unless you can
identify every library installed on python2.4 and set those up as
well, you'll probably wind up finding another broken app pretty
soon. So leaving /usr/bin/python alone is the best solution.
The FreeBSD folks are the only people I know who've even tried to
tackle this; they have an tool that identifies all the Python
libraries installed from ports or packages and reinstalls them on a
new python. But that doesn't work if you've installed a library by
hand.
<mike
--
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.
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