Python bites! Sometimes..?

As I am a Perl, Lua and shell utilities typical fan-boy; that is to say, a weird but committed KISS advocate; I will make this post as minimal as possible. Today, I was trying to package a little something for openSUSE. There were missing dependencies as usual so I went for it! Firstly libgmail, but then, mechanize. Crossed fingers at this time hoping for the build server to quit complaining about missing dependencies in an endless, tedious, time killing spiral... Finally, all went fine, but then I tried to adjust little details here and there in the spec file. e.g. python --version. As I am no expert in Python and surely I will never be, just tried to check out what is the better way to get the actual language version without the kludges of our beloved AWK! for just a single piece of information like this: 'Python 2.6'¹. That said, I went with the major here: Python 2.6 (r26:66714, Feb 3 2009, 20:49:49) [GCC 4.3.2 [gcc-4_3-branch revision 141291]] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> help help> modules Please wait a moment while I gather a list of all available modules... Segmentation fault Fascinating!! So, after that shame, I don't really know who is the people to blame about this... The SUSE people or the Pythonic ones? For an indented style yet powerful program (even a shell script) I will always pick Haskell!!

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Foot notes: 1. Some time ago I did found very easily the Perl way to do this perl -V:version. That's it. Practical and always better than the hard-coded paths of Python's ez_install...