How to upgrade python on Redhat?

[penglish1 at gmail.com]

This question applies specifically to RHEL 3.0 (actually Whitebox), but
also generally to Redhat and probably pretty much every distribution
that uses python for distribution-related tasks (configuration
managers, rpm package management, yum, etc).

So I want to upgrade to python 2.4 on Whitebox 3.0. Ideally I would
like python to live in /usr/bin and replace the python 2.2 that ships
with RHEL entirely. This gets pretty infeasable when you consider how
many packages depend on python 2.2:

cd /usr/lib/python2.2/site-packages
rpm -qf * | sort | uniq
alchemist-1.0.27-1
authconfig-4.3.7-1
ethereal-0.10.3-0.30E.1
file Ft is not owned by any package
file _xmlplus is not owned by any package
kudzu-1.1.22.2-1
libuser-0.51.7-1
libxml2-python-2.5.10-6
mod_python-3.0.3-3.ent
newt-0.51.5-1
parted-1.6.3-29
pygtk2-1.99.16-8
pyOpenSSL-0.5.1-8
pyorbit-1.99.3-5
python-2.2.3-5
python-optik-1.4.1-2
pyxf86config-0.3.5-1
redhat-config-printer-gui-0.6.47.3.19-1
rhnlib-1.5-1.1.WB1
rhpl-0.110.4-1
rpm-python-4.2.2-0.14.WB1
up2date-4.3.19-1.WB1

As best I can tell, I have 2 options:

1) Install python 2.4 from source over /usr/bin/python. Rebuild *all*
of the packages listed above from srpms and reinstall them.

2) Give up and install python 2.4 in /usr/local. This leaves me in the
awkward situation of having to ensure that all our in-house scripts,
all the time use /usr/local/bin/python.

I don't suppose there is a simple, rpm package based approach to fixing
this?