[Freewx-maint] Bug#857757: python-wxversion: broken symlink: /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/wx.pth -> ../../wx/python/wx.pth

[Olly Betts]

On Tue, Mar 14, 2017 at 06:50:52PM +0100, Andreas Beckmann wrote:
> 0m20.0s ERROR: FAIL: Broken symlinks:
>   /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/wx.pth -> ../../wx/python/wx.pth
> 
> A file called wx.pth does not exist in Debian/unstable.
> A possible target could be /usr/lib/wx/python/wx3.0.pth from python-wxgtk3.0.

The way this is meant to work is that the symlink points to:

/usr/lib/wx/python/wx.pth

which is managed by alternatives (so you can select wxpython 2.8 or 3.0
as the default) so that should be a symlink to:

/etc/alternatives/wx.pth

Which by default would be a symlink to:

/usr/lib/wx/python/wx3.0.pth

This is set up by the postinst for python-wxgtk3.0:

# This should be the version with "." removed - e.g. 30 for wxPython 3.0.
PRIORITY=30

update-alternatives --install /usr/lib/wx/python/wx.pth  wx.pth \
                              /usr/lib/wx/python/wx3.0.pth        $PRIORITY

So I think this is not really a bug - if you install python-wxversion by
itself, you indeed have a dangling symlink, but usually python-wxversion is
pulled in as a dependency of python-wxgtk3.0 or python-wxgtk2.8 or ...
and so the wx.pth symlink will have been set up by alternatives.  (We only
have 3.0 currently, but in general having support for multiple versions is
useful as migrating all the reverse dependencies is probably at least a
year-long undertaking).

Ideas for a saner setup are welcome - it was like that when I joined the
team.

Cheers,
    Olly