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If you're on RH derived systems, you're going to have a python 2.6 installed for rpm and yum to work.

This bit us in our ass with centos 6.8 , when another package required python 2.7... If you install 2.7 directly, your system fails with a thousand cuts. A chroot is needed for that, unfortunately.

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I had this problem recently. The solution was to install Python 2.7 as a software collection: https://www.softwarecollections.org/en/scls/rhscl/python27/

This installs it to /opt/rh, and you can run commands that need them with "scl enable python27 mything" or by sourcing /opt/rh/python27/enable in a script to set up PATH, etc.

chroot is unnecessary. You just install python 2.7 in its own directory and run it from there. The system-provided python 2.6 and your desired version of python should co-exist.

As a general rule, never try to replace any program or library supplied by your distribution.

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