Install gettext-0.17-1.el5.i386.rpm on CentOS 5.8 i386 gives "/usr/bin/python is needed" error

Question

I've removed yum by mistake. So, now I'm installing all the dependencies needed by yum manually. One of those is gettext-0.17-1.el5.i386.rpm and when I try to install it gives the following error,

error: Failed dependencies:
    /usr/bin/python is needed by gettext-0.17-1.el5.i386

which is weird since I've installed python 2.6 already in the system.

#python -V
Python 2.6.8
#which python
/usr/local/bin/python

So I copied /usr/local/bin/python to /usr/bin/python and even after that I'm getting the same error. Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

I was getting errors when I tried to install reviewboard (reviewboard.org) using Python 2.4. So I removed it and installed Python 2.6. Also I tried creating symlink and that too din't work.

Yum itself requires Python 2.4 among other Red Hat utilities. You're going to have a lot of problems related to the removal of Python 2.4. That error should probably more accurately read; /usr/bin/python (Python 2.4) is needed by....

See this question: Install Python 2.5 on RedHat/Centos. Also, another option is python26 is in EPEL. I'm not sure how recent it is, though.

Answer 2

Among other things, you removed the system Python package; yum is looking for the package which provides Python to be installed, not merely a Python binary. Reinstall the python package. And in the future, be very careful when removing packages.