Post Turkey Day (#1 Shopping Day) Greetings!
I am running CentOS-3 as a desktop distribution. Everything is fine except for Idle, the integrated development environment that comes with Python. Python is version 2.2, but Idle is version 0.8. The Idle 0.8 keyboard is driving me nuts.
On my Windows box, I downloaded from www.python.org and installed Python, and got Python 2.3 and Idle 1.0.8, which is MUCH BETTER -- so much better, even for code intended to be run only in Linux, I would much rather code Python in Windows!
Fedora comes with Python 2.3.
I have my own CentOS mirror, so I added a fedora mirror on the side, and I used rsync to grab only the python files from fedora mirrors.
I ran yum check-update. As a result, yum downloaded all the headers and reported no problems. But when I ran yum update, yum balked, giving a list of packages that are dependent on python2.2, "that is not available". The packages listed are:
authconfig-gtk comps-extras firstboot redhat-config-date redhat-config-keyboard redhat-config-kickstartrhpl redhat-config-language redhat-config-mouse redhat-config-nfs redhat-config-rootpassword redhat-config-samba redhat-config-securitylevel redhat-config-soundcardredhat-config-users redhat-config-xfree86
When I wrote to the yum mailing list, I put in:
"Unless Python 2.3 breaks those packages (which I think is unlikely), I thought I should be able to upgrade Python to a newer version without this kind of objection."
Seth wrote back that python 2.3 would break some of the packages, aparently because the packages have hardcoded paths, and the change of location from /usr/lib/python2.2 to /usr/lib/python2.3 would break some.
One possible work around would be to grab the packages on the above list from fedora in addition to just the python packages, but I would consider that a last resort.
One off the wall idea is to install python 2.3, but leave python 2.2 there for the packages with hardcoded paths. (I am not sure whether yum would cooperate on this plan.)
Is there a cleaner solution to this problem?
Thanks,
Rick