Installing Python on CentOS 6 - a big pain

[J.O. Aho]

John Nagle wrote:
> It turns out that installing Python 2.7.2 on CentOS 6.0 is a lot of work. Here
> are the official CentOS install instructions:
>
> http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=34515&forum=41

Don't see any official about the post, it's just another forum member who 
posts what he did to install a later version of Python than the default 2.6 
that comes with RedHat EL (and those comes with CentOS).


> Not only do you have to build Python from source, you have to install
> a lot of stuff before you can even build it.

To build a car, you need a lot of parts, and you need to build the engine too.
If you are building something yourself, you need header files and gcc, no 
matter if it's python or something else you want, you need those things and 
lucky you that you don't have something like ms-windows, then you don't have a 
package manager which will install most of the things you need, you would need 
to hunt down everything yourself (I know ms-win has already compiled versions, 
but we are talking about compiling yourself).


> Then you have to install
> various Python packages from multiple sources. Python doesn't work
> with "yum"; you have to do it the hard way.

That's the life when you don't want to use what you are given for free, I'm 
sure someone would put up a repo for you if you paid them to compile python 
and all the modules for it.


> I know how to do all this, but it takes hours. I'm bringing up
> a bare dedicated server remotely, which is a routine operation.

If you build your own RPMs, you can do that on your desktop machine, no need 
to do it on the underpowered VPS or really, you should have picked a 
distribution which gives you python 2.7 by default instead, just visit 
distrowatch.com and you can find at least one within two minutes.


> Python does not "just work". I should be able to command
> "yum install python27". (And not clobber the Python 2.6 that
> comes with CentOS.)
>
> This sort of thing is why Python is losing market share.

It's not Python developers fault that some distributions choose to stay with 
older versions of Python instead of switching to 3.2 at once, or that ms-win 
don't have python at all.
If you want CentOS to have a newer python by default, then contact RedHat, but 
before they listen to you, you may need to get some RedHat licenses.



-- 

   //Aho