I write a lot of little Python scripts. And I use Ubuntu and Debian. So why aren’t any of my scripts packaged for those distros? Because Debian packaging is absurdly hard, and there’s very little documentation on how to do it. In particular, there’s no help on how to take something small, like a Python [...]

Time for another installment of my ongoing mission to convert the world to Python 3! This time, a little Debian packaging-fu for modifying an existing Python 2 package to include support for Python 3 from the same source package

We’ve got a new server and It’s debian 5.05 (Lenny). We’ll be deploying python web apps all over the server, so this is how I did it.

Here’s a short python script I must have knocked up some time ago – and totally forgotten – hopefully it’ll be of some use to others….Purpose: backup all MySQL databases, one in each file with a timestamp on the end. You’ll probably want to have a secondary cron job which does something like……..

Debian has always been my number one linux choice due to its stability on a server. Most of other linux distributions release new versions too frequently, in my opinion, while there are bugs still unfixed with the existing version.

Just a quick note to Google-eyed installers of Python who can’t get python to start after compiling it from source. Debian 5 ships with Python 2.5.x and complains about libpython after you install 2.6 or 2.7.

Hi, we just used a big enough hammer to let python 2.6 migrate to testing; it’ll be pushed out to the mirrors with the next pulse.

Here’s a short python script I must have knocked up some time ago – and totally forgotten – hopefully it’ll be of some use to others….Purpose: backup all MySQL databases, one in each file with a timestamp on the end

Nothing different about AMD64. Note that before doing sudo make install, you may wish to remove /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages directory especially if you have a previous installation of Python 32-bit system.

Actually Debian has the python-wxgtk2.8 package which you can simply apt-get if you wish to have it installed as part of Python 2.5 which is the stable version for Lenny. I’m adding wxPython 2.8 to Python 2.6, which I installed from source.

Since I’m really behind the notion of people moving to Python 3 (not only did I write a book about it, Python 3 is a better language), let me recap your options for installing Python 3 on Ubuntu systems. The same approach will work for Debian boxes.

Peter Eisentraut, a software engineer at F-Secure who also works on PostgreSQL and is a Debian Developer, has some good advice for people concerned about the adoption rate of Python 3.

In case anyone else has the misfortune of being stuck on a Debian Etch box with Python 2.5 and finds themselves needing Python-LDAP:…