Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 87938
python redhat-config-* don't work if PYTHONHOME is set
Last modified: 2015-01-14 18:19:43 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4a) Gecko/20030401 Description of problem: The redhat-config-* python scripts don't function if the user has set PYTHONHOME. The redhat-config-kickstart script, for example, explicitly sets PYTHONPATH so that if the user sets a different PYTHONPATH the script will still function. On our systems we have a custom python version installed in /usr/local and we use PYTHONHOME=/usr/local to translate library paths. This breaks redhat-config-kickstart. I am able to solve the problem by adding the following to all the redhat python driver scripts: export PYTHONHOME=/usr I think this is a pretty failsafe solution. Is it possible to have this added officially? Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): Version 8.0 through 9 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. set PYTHONHOME to other than /usr 2. start redhat-config-kickstart Actual Results: Can't find necessary python modules. Expected Results: Starts up. Additional info:
msw, does this make sense to add?
This seems to be a pretty uncommon problem, so I'm reluctant to go change all the redhat-config tools. Even if I make those changes, other Python apps that do not manually export PYTHONHOME will still break. This makes me think that this is not the right way to solve the problem. I am going to close this as 'wontfix' but I will reconsider if we start to see more of these reports in the future.
Let me try to explain a bit better. Here's the script I'm talking about: #!/bin/sh export PYTHONPATH=/usr/share/redhat-config-kickstart /usr/bin/python /usr/share/redhat-config-kickstart/redhat-config-kickstart.py One way to think about this is that PYTHONPATH and PYTHONHOME are coupled. If you force a specific PYTHONPATH and python version (with /usr/bin/python) you should also reset PYTHONHOME. Now if you did the following it would be a different story: #!/bin/sh export PYTHONPATH=/usr/share/redhat-config-kickstart:${PYTHONPATH} python /usr/share/redhat-config-kickstart/redhat-config-kickstart.py > Even if I make those changes, other Python apps that > do not manually export PYTHONHOME will still break. Actually that isn't true. Most applications don't force a specific PYTHONPATH (or override the user's settings) and python version. If they did then they should reset PYTHONHOME. It's fine if you don't want to do it but I don't think it is technically correct.
Sorry, one more thing. As a practical matter the support cost of users being able to hose all of the redhat-config-* tools simply by setting one enviroment variable is large. The risk of this patch == 0.