Centos – Python update, broke yum and python

As a worst-case scenario, you could always just compile your own version of openssl as an RPM for your system, and then rpm -ihv.

EDIT: Starting with the source file (.tar.gz), here's what you want to do:

1) Create a new directory to house the RPM hierarchy.

# mkdir -p myopenssl/BUILD myopenssl/RPMS myopenssl/SOURCES myopenssl/SPECS myopenssl/SRPMS

2) Go into the SOURCES directory, and download your source openssl.tar.gz

# cd myopenssl/SOURCES
# mv openssl.tar.gz myopenssl/SOURCES/

3) Create a spec file that provides the necessary metadata (you will need to verify all the values are correct)

--- spec ----
%define _topdir     /home/user/myopenssl
%define name            openssl
%define release     0
%define version     x.x
%define buildroot %{_topdir}/%{name}-%{version}-root

BuildRoot:  %{buildroot}
Summary:        openssl
License:        GPL
Name:           %{name}
Version:        %{version}
Release:        %{release}
Source:         %{name}-%{version}.tar.gz
Prefix:         /usr
Group:          Development/Tools

%description
Special build of openssl for centos.

%prep
%setup -q

%build
./configure
make

%install
make install prefix=$RPM_BUILD_ROOT/usr

%files
%defattr(-,root,root)
/usr/local/bin/openssl

%doc %attr(0444,root,root) /usr/local/share/man/man1/openssl.1

4) After you have a spec file, use the rpmbuild command to build your RPM

# rpmbuild -v -bb --clean myopenssl/SPECS/openssl.spec

5) Your RPM is built at this point... use the following command to look at the contents:

# rpm -Vp RPMS/i386/myopenssl.i386.rpm

6) To install it, run the following as root:

# rpm -ihv myopenssl.i386.rpm

Hope this helps!

Unfortunately, you cannot remove Python 2.4 from RHEL5, unless you're able to remove (or patch) dozens of Python scripts that only work with 2.4, not 2.6. You can easily install 2.6 in parallel with 2.4 (as you already know), but removing 2.4 is "major surgery". You can certainly try, but most users/operators just don't bother.

As another poster noted, '/usr/bin/python26' is in your default PATH, just like '/usr/bin/python'. On the command line, you can just call 'python26' instead of 'python'. In your 2.6-specific scripts/programs, you can replace your she-bang lines with '#!/usr/bin/python26'.

Handling 2.6-only modules is a bit harder. You'll need to move them from '/usr/lib/python/...' to '/usr/lib/python26/...'. If you're lucky, somebody may have already packaged a variant specifically for Python 2.6 on RHEL5 with the paths changed, or you can modify and rebuild existing RPMs, yourself.

The problem is that the transition from Python 2.4 to 2.6 introduced a few backward-incompatibilities. So a lot of scripts authored with 2.4 in mind won't run properly under 2.6 without some patching. (There are people who claim that 2.6 IS backwards compatible... it's close, but not 100%.)

Recent Fedora releases and the RHEL6 beta ship more advanced Python versions (2.5+), along with updates to dozens (possibly hundreds) of Python scripts, too. But Red Hat decided to keep its EL5 branch on Python 2.4, probably due to the risk of breaking any Python 2.4-only scripts running on clients' machines. (This is a pretty standard practice for a long-term-stable distro series like RHEL.)