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Comment by bcl | Hacker News Reader

FYI - Fedora 13 shipped with Python 2.6, Fedora 14 is going to ship with Python 2.7 and 3.1 in parallel. Not every distribution ships ancient versions.

I also recommend using virtualenv and pip, these tools make it much easier to create an easily reproducable Python environment.

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Not every distribution ships ancient versions.

RHEL, meanwhile, does not ship 3.1, 2.7 or 2.6. And to be perfectly honest, if you're seriously distributing Python software you have to take RHEL into account -- "Fedora ships something newer" doesn't help.

I don't use Python at all. Despite that, I still somehow have Python 2.6.4 installed on my RHEL4 box at work. (Incidentally, the Linux version number is only slightly higher -- 2.6.9!!!)

So it seems like it's possible to get 2.6 on RHEL. I did it, and I hate Python.

I can't help but note that hating Python seems irrational.

The EPEL5 repository has Python 2.6 available - http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/SRPMS/repoview/...

+1. If you use RHEL, a 'python26' package from a known good source like EPEL is the best place to get a new python that doesn't mess with your existing OS python.

True, but I have had no end of problems using Python apps on Fedora. I now pretty much kill the packages straight away and reinstall from source.

Have you filed bug reports with those packages?

The bug reports exist for the two main bugs I come across.

The main problem is that I could upgrade a couple of systems to fix the bug but doing that tends to break python (with the infamous _md5 error) spectacularly :)

Catch 22.

CentOS is on 2.4

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