Archive for February, 2007

For John…

Friday, February 2nd, 2007

Wow, everything has to be difficult. I decided to do a big upgrade on one of my servers which runs debian, and for each package it tried to install it could not successfully run dpkg –configure. the python component would error out and it would just fail. this meant that many packages would not get configured (like debconf) and so many other packages would not get upgraded at all! What a PITA. to top it off, i could find no mention online of the particular python error message i was seeing (in this context) — something about assignment to None). Fortunately i was able to determine what script was being run by dpkg when the error occured (thanks strace!), which allowed me to narrow down the source of the problem and find out what lines the error occured on. Taking this newfound information i googled for the most interesting part of that line of code: “None=None”. Sure enough i found someone’s patch which solves “None=None” warnings (and errors in python2.4). The patch shows that the fix is simply to change ‘None=None’ to ‘none=None’! After modifying the following files, dpkg finally worked and the upgrade was able to continue through to completion without any further problems. hooray!file list:

  • /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/mx/Tools/mxTools/bench2.py
  • /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/mx/Tools/Tools.py
  • /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/mx/DateTime/DateTime.py
  • /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/mx/BeeBase/BeeStorage.py
  • /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/mx/BeeBase/BeeDict.py

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