Installing new version, erasing previous versions of Python

[Maurice LING]

Hi David,

I'm using Python on Mac OSX and although my case is not precisely your 
scenario but it is pretty common to have more than 1 pythons installed 
in Mac OSX 10.3, if Fink is used.

> 
> If I understand the above correctly, 1) "make install" and "make altinstall" use
> the same process, the only difference being the man page update, and the hard
> link, and 2) that previous versions of python are not deleted.  Therefore I
> should be able to install 2.4 without deleting 2.2.2.  If I wish to delete
> 2.3.4, I have to rm -r the appropriate directories.  Any caveats? 

On the assumption that you are using *nix-based system, there shouldn't 
be any problems. But you might want to look at /usr/local/bin/py* files 
and symlinks to get an idea of what you are dealing with.

On MS Windows system, I do not know if there is any registry entries etc 
to be taken care of.

  Is there any
> crosstalk between 2.2.2 and 2.4 modules?  Thank you.

Every python seems to maintain its own set of libraries and 3rd party 
packages.

In my case, I've removed Apple-installed python 2.3 by rm -rf the 
appropriate directories and re-symlinked the links in /usr/lib. Fink had 
installed python2.2 and python2.3 in my system and they co-exist 
happily. Each python has its own libraries to use, in my case, in 
/sw/lib/python2.2 and /sw/lib/python2.3

Of course, depending on which python you use to install 3rd party 
libraries, it will go into that python's site-package directory. If any 
causes trouble, I'll guess it will be this.

Hope this helps.

Maurice