[gentoo-user] Installing python packages for different versions

[Florian Philipp]

Hi!

This is actually a follow-up for my thread "Trouble installing Plone".

Following scenario: I have packages which run on python-2.4 and other
packages which work with 2.5. Zope is a prominent example of the 2.4 gang.

The problem: When I emerge a python package, for example
dev-python/imaging, it is only installed in the
/usr/lib/python-2.*/site-packages directory of the python version which
is currently enabled by eselect.

Naturally, this is the most recent version: 2.5. However, as soon as a
python-2.4 package depends on one of these other packages, it just
doesn't work because it expects them in /usr/lib/python-2.4/site-packages.

How am I supposed to work around this?

My current workaround is to switch temporarily to python-2.4 and
re-emerge the necessary packages. However, this only works as long as
there are either 2.4-packages which depend on these re-emerged ones or
2.5-packages because portage purges the corresponding byte code in the
now disabled python directory.

Regards,

Florian Philipp