Centos – the best way to install python 2.6 on a CentOs server

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CentOS 5.4 comes with python 2.4 standard. Yum doesn't seem to know python 2.6. What is the best way to install python 2.6, so it will be available for scripts and Apache HTTPd without breaking anything else?

Best Answer

Last time I played with different versions of python (at least a couple of revisions back so this may have changed and on Debian so with other distros YMMV), when compiling and installing from source you can do make altinstall instead of make install. This creates just a pythonX.Y binary and does not touch any current python binary. This way you get he right version by running, say, python2.6 (or using #!/usr/bin/python2.6 at the head of a script) but if just python is specified the previous default is used. As the standard libraries are usually separated by version they should not conflict, though you may need to tweak your command and library search paths in some cases and some third party modules might need some alteration to install in the non-default place.

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