Install Python 2.6 on Debian Etch

(From : http://weblog.patrice.ch/2009/01/14/install-python-2-6-on-debian-etch.html)

 

Debian doesn’t yet have any Python 2.6 packages. But creating them on your own is very easy.

You can:

• download my package
• or build your own and learn something in the process.

The download will disappear as soon as I see some real distribution which doesn’t take all my shortcuts.

So this are step-by-step instructions for typing in your shell.

 

Download

 

$ curl -O http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.6.1/Python-2.6.1.tar.bz2
$ mv Python-2.6.1.tar.bz2 python2.6-2.6.1.tar.bz2
$ tar -xvjf python2.6-2.6.1.tar.bz2
$ mv Python-2.6.1 python2.6-2.6.1
$ cd python2.6-2.6.1/

 

You need to properly name the directories as “packagename-version”. Inthis case the package name is “python2.6” – not “python” – which is whythe version seems to be repeated.

 

Get all the dependencies

 

$ dh_make -e yourmail@yourdomain.com -f ../python2.6-2.6.1.tar.bz2
$ vi debian/control
$ vi debian/rules

 

Above you have to edit control and rules. The contents are below:

debian/control

I just copied the dependencies from the official python2.5 package to save time.

 

Source: python2.6
Section: python
Priority: extra
Maintainer: Patrice Neff 
Build-Depends: debhelper (>= 5), autotools-dev
Standards-Version: 3.7.2
Build-Depends: debhelper (>= 4.2), autoconf, libreadline5-dev, libncursesw5-dev (>= 5.3), tk8.4-dev, libdb4.4-dev, zlib1g-dev, libgdbm-dev, blt-dev (>= 2.4z), libssl-dev, sharutils, libbz2-dev, libbluetooth2-dev [!hurd-i386 !kfreebsd-i386 !kfreebsd-amd64], locales, libsqlite3-dev, libffi4-dev (>= 4.1.0), mime-support, libgpmg1 [!hurd-i386 !kfreebsd-i386 !kfreebsd-amd64], netbase, lsb-release, bzip2, libffi4-dev (>= 4.1.1-11) [m68k], binutils (>= 2.17-2+b2) [m68k]
Build-Depends-Indep: libhtml-tree-perl, tetex-bin, tetex-extra, texinfo, emacs21, debiandoc-sgml, sharutils

    

Package: python2.6
Architecture: any
Depends: ${shlibs:Depends}, ${misc:Depends}, mime-support
Description: An interactive high-level object-oriented language (version 2.6) Version 2.6 of the high-level, interactive object oriented language, includes an extensive class library with lots of goodies for network programming, system administration, sounds and graphics.

 

 

debian/rules

Edit the debian/rules file. This is aMakefile used to build the package. You’ll need to add some fine-tuningto the install target.

On top after the CFLAGS add:

 

ROOT = $(CURDIR)/debian/python2.6/usr

Then in the install target, you need to add the contents from below.

 

 

install: build
    # .....
    $(MAKE) prefix=$(CURDIR)/debian/python2.6/usr install

    # START from here
    # Remove python, we’ll only have python2.6
    rm $(ROOT)/bin/python{,-config}
    mv $(ROOT)/share/man/man1/{python,python2.6}.1
    # Remove stuff we don’t need
    rm $(ROOT)/bin/{idle,2to3,pydoc,smtpd.py}
    rm -r $(ROOT)/lib/python2.6/test
    # END until here

 

 

Build package

You can now compile and install this package.

 

$ dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot
$ sudo dpkg -i ../python*.deb