2.3 or 2.4 on linux

[Paul Watson]

Sells, Fred wrote:
> We are in the process of standardizing ~10 Linux servers on Lineox 4.x,
> which is a variant of RedHat Enterprise server I'm told.  Part of that
> process is to standardize python.
> 
> The baseline install includes python 2.3 which is adequate, but I would like
> to standardize on 2.4.1, because it is the latest and greatest and has a few
> modules that would be nice to have.   I installed python 2.4.1 ok, creating
> a python24 directory alongside the pyhton23 directory.  The problems started
> when I tried to install MySQLdb.
> 
> My problem is that all the rpm installs seem to impact the 2.3 that's there.
> When I check the 2.3 site-packages directory, I find alot of goodies like 
> 
> Alchemist.py  kudzu.py                rpmdb
> authconfigmodule.so    rpmmodule.so  CacheBlackBox.py      libusermodule.so
> _snackmodule.so
>   mod_python              snack.py  CompatMysqldb.py      mx
> CompatMysqldb.pyc     MySQLdb   FileBlackBox.py       _mysql_exceptions.py
> URLBlackBox.py
>   ForgeBlackBox.py  _mysql.so     xf86config.py ForgeBlackBox.pyo
> pyalchemist_python.py
>    _xmlplus
> ixf86configmodule.so 
> 
> I assume some system tools must use them, even if I don't.  I don't know if
> I can just copy all this into the 2.4 site-packages (deleting .pyc and .pyo)
> and get what I need.
> 
> I'm not a sysadmin hotshot, and our sysadmin is not a python hotshot, so
> between us we can really screw up a system.  We would really like to stick
> with either apt-get or rpm installs to keep our sysadmin issues under
> control.  Has anyone hit this wall already and found a reasonable solution?.
> 
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Since you have two versions of Python on the machine, which one is first 
in the execution path?  What is the output of the 'python -V' command?

You might also try 'which python' or 'whence python' commands.