Re: [gentoo-user] ARGH I uninstalled python

[Jorge Morais <please.no.spam.here@gmail.com>]

> Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
> 
> I followed this
> 
> http://blogs.pwmn.net/korkakak/2008/06/04/gentoo-i-unmerged-python-now-what
> 
> which worked - in the end. couple of caveats tho for anyone 'that follows' get python from their site as the ftp link in this article is out of date.
> 
> http://www.python.org/download/releases/
> 
> also I initially tried 3.01 and that didn't work so i installed 2.6.2 which worked 'out of the box' i then tested with 'emerge' and am now running 'emerge -va python' 
> 
> Cheers guys!
> 
> Thanks to Dale too!

Glad it worked.
But, I don't know what will happen when the properly emerged python
overwrites the manually installed Python.

Does anybody know if the manual python install is "slotted", in the sense
that it installs files in /usr/lib/python2.6, /usr/include/python2.6, etc?
If it isn't, and Portage installs a slotted Python, the old files wouldn't
be overwritten.
And even if it is, the differences between the differently-configured and
super-patched new python and the vanilla old python could result in
a different set of file names, so it is possible that the old python
will not be totally overwritten by the portage-emerged python.

If I were you, I would at the very least read the log (specially its tail)
of the python emerge (emerge logs normally go to /var/log/emerge).
And you did log the files installed by the manual python install,
didn't you?

And why did you try python 3.01 first? You should try a similar vesion to
what you were previously running. And specifically python 3.01 is crazy,
as it is widely known that it is *not* compatible with python 2.x software.
And did you properly uninstall python 3.0.1?

Also, I didn't like the instructions in this blog very much.
Wouldn't it be more appropriate to configure python like
portage would?
For example, in my system, where the last python install was
dev-lang/python-2.5.4-r2  USE="ncurses readline ssl threads xml -berkdb -build -doc -examples -gdbm -ipv6 -sqlite -tk -ucs2 -wininst"

the configure line was (from the log)
./configure --prefix=/usr --host=i686-pc-linux-gnu --mandir=/usr/share/man --infodir=/usr/share/info --datadir=/usr/share --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var/lib --with-fpectl --enable-shared --disable-ipv6 --infodir=${prefix}/share/info --mandir=${prefix}/share/man --with-libc= --enable-unicode=ucs4 --with-threads --build=i686-pc-linux-gnu

Maybe it would  be nice to install python to  /usr/local (I'm not sure),
but if you are going to install it in /usr (like portage), I think you
might as well use the same configure line portage would.
And if you wanted to be really clean, you could apply the patches that
portage applies.

And most importantly,
*was this necessary*?
Couldn't he have emerged python by invoking
ebuild /usr/port/usr/portage/dev-lang/python/python-2.6.2.ebuild merge
?
This would do everyting correctly.
And wouldn't it work without Python, since it is written in Bash?
AFAIK, what needs Python is the high level interface to the portage
system, while the low-level interface only needs Bash (but I'm
totally not sure).

And finally, couldn't he have gotten a binary package from
http://tinderbox.dev.gentoo.org/default-linux/x86/dev-lang/
?