Installing Python on CentOS 6 - a big pain

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 9:47 PM, Steven D'Aprano
<steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
> 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.)

What I do is apt-get the most obvious things (g++/gcc and make, in
this case), then run configure and see if it bombs, then run make and
see if it bombs, and whenever there's a "command not found", attempt
to apt-get that command as a package name. It usually works.

Generally, if my boss (not as familiar with the commands as I, and
prefers GUI tools where possible) asks me to set down exactly what I
needed to do to get XYZ going, the notes end up looking pretty
prohibitive, but it doesn't take long to guess your way through
things.

ChrisA