Installing Python on CentOS 6 - a big pain

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Thu, 19 Jan 2012 20:43:23 +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 3:36 PM, Steven D'Aprano
> <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
>> With all the tools installed, it's a matter of a few minutes effort to
>> build from scratch:

[...]
> Now, granted, this was Debian and I can't speak for Centos. But it would
> surprise me greatly if your package manager can't provide build
> essentials.

I daresay any decent package manager would be able to provide the 
complete tool chain for building Python from source. But I have no idea 
what tools are needed -- gcc and make, obviously, but what else? Maybe it 
really is as simple as "yum install gcc make", but I suspect that it 
won't be. "yum install gcc make yacc bison elephant weasel fox cow spam 
ham cheese chalk aardvark" perhaps. (I may have made one or two of those 
up.)

Best of all, if the BOFH who built your system deliberately removed the 
package manager, what are you going to do then? :)

But really, we're all just guessing here. Unless John Nagle decides to 
tell us, we have *no idea* why he found it so difficult to build from 
source. "No compiler tools" is just my guess.


-- 
Steven