Problems with scripts in a common spec file
With reference to the guidelines for Python packaging found here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Python
Specifically the material concerning executables in /usr/bin.
In the "Example common spec file" section is this comment.
# Must do the python2 install first because the scripts in /usr/bin are
# overwritten with every setup.py install, and in general we want the
# python3 version to be the default.
But this does not work if you only install the python2-XXX package
instead of both the python2-XXX and python3-XXX packages. Here is why.
distutils will adjust the shbang interpreter line in installed scripts
to be interpreter specific, e.g. you get one of:
#!/usr/bin/python2
or
#!/usr/bin/python3
But the guidelines require the py3 version of the script in the py2
package. Thus if you install just the python2-XXX package you'll end up
with a script that runs the /usr/bin/python3 interpreter whose sys.path
only includes library locations for py3! Thus the script cannot execute
because it's missing its libraries (because the libraries were installed
in the py2 locations).
How is this supposed to be addressed?
One possible workaround is to add a requirement on the py3 package in
the py2 package. But that is silly because it completely negates
everything in the py2 package (everything will run as if it were py3
after installing the py2 package and the py2 files will never be
referenced).
Perhaps the issue is better rephrased as "How does one package Python
when there are no version specific differences/requirements?" If this is
covered in the guidelines it's not obvious and needs clarification. I
assume this means using the generic %{_python} macros instead of dual
use of the version specific macros so that everything corresponds to the
system default version of Python. Correct?
--
John