Jaunty python upgrade prevents pygtk apps from working

news · March 27, 2009

This morning python2.6 version 2.6.1-1ubuntu5 made it in to Jaunty after

being held for a few days for the freeze. Unfortunately this package

contained an ABI break that meant some python extensions no longer

worked, most notably pygtk. In other words if you installed this version

you would see some apps fail to start with a message "undefined symbol:

PyUnicodeUCS4_DecodeUTF8". Most importantly update-manager was affected,

making it harder to upgrade to a fixed version.

Access to the bad packages was blocked, which is why you might have

seen 403 errors if you attempted to upgrade this morning, and fixed

packages have been uploaded as version 2.6.1-1ubuntu5.1.

To find out if you have the bad version of the package installed you

can run

dpkg -l python2.6 | cat

If the version is not 2.6.1-1ubuntu5 then you are unaffected, you should

just be sure that you don't install that version if it is still

accessible on your mirror.

If you do have the bad version installed then you can upgrade using

apt-get.

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

The fixed packages have only just been made available on the primary

mirror, so you may need to wait a few hours before they can become

available.

Thanks,

James

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