[Centos] package dependency problem

Fri Nov 26 07:08:12 UTC 2004
Rick Graves <gravesricharde at yahoo.com>

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