Python error interpretation

[Hal Burgiss]

On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 3:26 PM, CLIFFORD ILKAY
<clifford_ilkay at dinamis.com> wrote:

>> Overall, I love apt, but occasionally its really oddly difficult to
>> start with a clean slate.
>>
>> I may do an apt purge, and then physical hunt and destroy for python
>> pieces.
>
> The situation you've described illustrates the problems of ad-hoc system
> administration and why using configuration management tools like
> cfengine, puppet, or bcfg are desirable. You should never be in a
> position where the cost of doing a clean install is so high that you
> avoid it.

Thanks for the input. I'll check some of these out.

In theory. The history here is that this hardware would consistently
crash during an 8.04 installation. For some reason, 6.06 worked. So to
get 8.04 on it, we did a 6.0.6  install first, and then upgraded up to
8.04. I probably will be in the same boat again, and I might be right
where I am now if Chris's suspicions are correct.

> Kickstart/preseed installations, Cobbler, virtualization, LVM, cfengine,
> and Subversion are all tools we use to automate system installation,
> configuration management, and recovery.

If I get bzr working, it will do about 90% of what I want on a new
server, plus distribute updates to various other servers. I'll look at
these other tools to see if they fit with our work flow. I toyed with
svn for this, but just like bzr better. Setting up new servers is not
something we do on a regular basis. We did maybe 3 last year.

> By the way, removing/installing Python may not solve your problem. You

I realize there might be other system stuff broken effecting python.

> should be able to run any number of versions of Python and Python
> packages on your system, if you understand how to set PYTHONPATH. For
> instance, sometimes we need to deploy a Django application with a
> specific version of Django that is different than the global one that
> we've deployed in site-packages. In that case, we just check out the
> specific version of Django into some sensible place, like the directory
> containing the Django application, and adjust PYTHONPATH accordingly.
> Here is a real example of a shell script from one of our projects.
>
> cilkay at saturn:~/projects/ccf$ cat paths.sh
> export
> PYTHONPATH=/home/cilkay/projects/ccf/django_0.96.3:/home/cilkay/projects/ccf/:/home/cilkay/projects/ccf/lib/
>

Any ideas on how I should set that for a default out of the box 8.04
installation? I'll try almost anything now.

Thanks!

-- 
Hal