diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 4296288..fe76399 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -44,3 +44,17 @@ Successfully installed rpm-0.1.0 (env) $ python -c "import rpm; print(rpm.__version__)" 4.18.0 ``` + +## Using RPM bindings with a different Python version than the system Python + +On many systems, the shim module will be able to find the system-installed RPM bindings, even if you use a different version of Python (e.g. Fedora 38 ships with Python 3.11 by default, but the shim will also work in a Python 3.10 virtualenv). + +On some distributions (especially Debian/Ubuntu ones), it will not work and raise a `ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'rpm._rpm'`. This is because those distributions encode the Python version in the name of the `_rpm.so` file: `_rpm.cpython-38-x86_64-linux-gnu.so`. + +You can make the shim module work on such systems by creating a symlink to the generic `_rpm.so` name: + +```bash +for file in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rpm/_rpm*.cpython-*.so; do + sudo ln -s ${file} $(echo ${file} | sed 's/\.cpython[^.]*//'); +done +```