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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-25T14:24:14+00:00

Because I have to install multiple versions of Python on multiple Oracle Linux servers

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Because I have to install multiple versions of Python on multiple Oracle Linux servers which are built via a kickstart process, I wanted to build a python rpm for our yum repository. I was able to build Python manually using ‘make altinstall’ which doesn’t install over your default system Python installation, so I thought that would be the way to go.

After much trial and error, I managed to build an rpm starting with a .bz2 python 2.7 package – but now when I try to install it, I get an error: 

error: Failed dependencies:
    /usr/local/bin/python is needed by Python-2.7.2-1.i386

What the…??? Python is what I’m trying to install!!! And system default Python (2.4) is in /usr/bin/python!!! And my prototyping location for the python directory is /tmp/python2.7 (and the executable was /tmp/python2.7/bin/python2.7). So why is it looking in /usr/local/bin?

Here is the core of my RPM SPEC:

%prep
%setup -q

%build
./configure --prefix=/tmp/python2.7
make

%install

make altinstall

I take a closer look at the rpm build log and I see:

Requires: /bin/sh /tmp/python2.7/bin/python2.7 /usr/bin/env /usr/local/bin/python libc.so.6 libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.0)...[a lot more...]

Ok, so there’s where /usr/local/bin comes in… Now, the question is, how is it determining these requirements? Did I specify something wrong? Do I need to override something?

Like many rpm newbies, I get the build part, but I don’t really “grok” what happens at the end of rpmbuild and what actually gets put into the rpm file (other than the files you specify in %files) and then what actually happens when you do the rpm install.

Can anyone suggest why my install is failing or what I might read to understand why my rpm build is requiring what I’m trying to build?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You should be able to fix this issue by adding the following line to your spec file:

    AutoReq: no

    Here is my understanding of why this is necessary. When rpmbuild runs across .py files with a #! (shebang) it will automatically add the binary that the shebang specifies as a requirement. Not only that, if the shebang is #!/usr/bin/env python, it will add a dependency for whatever that resolves to (first python on $PATH).

    You either need to turn off the automatic requirement processing or find all shebangs that will cause problems and change them to something else.

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